Religion Around Shakespeare 9780271062495

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religion around shakespeare

Religion Around vol. 1

pe te r ive r kauf ma n, General Editor Books in the Religion Around series examine the religious forces surrounding cultural icons. By bringing religious background into the foreground, these studies give readers a greater understanding of and appreciation for individual figures, their work, and their lasting influence.

religion around Shakespeare

peter iver kaufman The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kaufman, Peter Iver, author. Religion around Shakespeare / Peter Iver Kaufman.    p.   cm—(Religion around) Summary: “Examines the historic and religious context surrounding the work of William Shakespeare”—​Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-271-06181-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—​Religion. 2. England—​Church history—16th century. 3. England—​Church history—17th century. 4. Christianity and literature—England— History—16th century. 5. Christianity and literature—England— History—17th century. 6. Religion in literature. I. Title. pr3011.k38 2013 822.3’3—​dc23 2013023204

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

Contents

Acknowledgments  {vi} Introduction  {1}

1 Religion Around  {7}



2 Around Shakespeare  {47} interlude 

{87}



3 Religious Authority  {89}



4 Religious Personality

{123}



5 Religious Community

{157}

Conclusion  {187} Notes  {201} Bibliography  {223} Index  {246}

Acknowledgments

Professors Darryl Gless, Norm Jones, and Richard Mallette read earlier drafts of the entire manuscript. Their kindness made me a more careful author; their criticism made this a better book. Parts of it profited from reviews and remarks by Kristin Bezio, Barbara Hanrahan, John Headley, Ritchie Kendall, Peter Lake, and Albert Rabil Jr. At Albion College, Samford University, the United States Military Academy at West Point, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Richmond, my student and faculty colleagues have coaxed me to be more intelligent and more intelligible. Jerry Brauer and Bernie McGinn, at the start, suggested that I might make a contribution as a historical theologian. Early on—but closer to the start than to the finish—Professors Stephen Greenblatt and Debora Shuger suggested that this historical theologian might usefully poach in a field leagues away from his training ground. I hope they are not terribly displeased by the results. To list all the other sources of encouragement and inspiration would tax the patience of two of them at the Pennsylvania State University Press, Patrick Alexander and Kathryn Yahner. Begging the pardon of all those unmentioned, I cannot proceed responsibly without also naming Joanne Ciulla, Don Forsyth, Clark and Nancy Gilpin, Al Goethals, Gill Hickman, Crystal Hoyt, Roger Kaufman, Gary McDowell, Shirley Ort, Stephanie Paulsell, Sandra Peart, Terry Price, Kerstin Soderlund, Thad Williamson, and Tom Wren. Julie Schoelles, at the press, expertly scrubbed the manuscript and gently spared its maker many embarrassments. This book is dedicated to Len, Miles, Rob, and Scott with gratitude for a friendship that has lasted for just under fifty years. They will be happy that this eagle has landed with less fuss than the last.

introduction

I am not a literary historian, and what follows is not another interpretation of several of Shakespeare’s plays. For decades I have been studying the religious cultures of late Tudor and early Jacobean England, particularly what Alison Shell now calls the “fierce internal debate” that “beset” the established church, which was having problems as well “see[ing] off challenges from outside.”1 What I do in this book is give everyone interested in reading, watching, interpreting, or  performing the plays a good look at the religion around Shakespeare. Circumstance is my subject. Historians have long been at work on the religion of Shakespeare, and a few have gotten around to the religion around him. Several relatively recent and much publicized efforts suggest that late Elizabethan and early Stuart theatergoers justifiably saw Shakespeare’s plays as coded endorsements of expatriate Catholic missionaries’ efforts to restore the realm’s old faith, which Shell characterizes as “challenges from [the] outside.” Those presentations of the playwright’s Catholicism claim to have cracked the code that concealed his religiously unreformed opinions from religiously reformed government

censors while it cued Catholics in his first audiences to his abiding allegiance to what they remembered as traditional Christianity.2 What twenty-first-century playgoers may see and hear simply as Hamlet’s brooding over the skull of poor Yorick is, after some code cracking, an “encrypted tribute” to the Englishman Edmund Campion, who left the realm rather than subscribe to his queen’s religion, returned to reinforce the faith of the resident Catholics, and died a martyr. Some critics trust that other signs of Shakespeare’s pro-Catholic sentiments need no decryption. After all, how could playgoers fail to be impressed by the reverence for Isabella and the respect for Catholic convents radiating from his Measure for Measure? Very easily! Isabella can be off-putting, which is understandable at times, but wholly un-conventual. She tells her brother, who asked her to compromise her virtue to keep him from the scaffold, that she will “pray a thousand prayers for [his] death.” She will utter “no word to save” him (3.1.145–46). Measure is hardly a token of the playwright’s nostalgia for the higher righteousness professed by the realm’s chaste monks and nuns before monastic foundations were dissolved during the reigns of Elizabeth’s father and step-brother. For, unless we learn something suggesting that Shakespeare wanted audiences to supply a prenuptial altercation after the final exeunt, we must assume Isabella’s departure with Duke Vincentio signaled her consent to his proposal of marriage. Measure’s formerly “enskied” nun-to-be, therefore, was wed, bedded, and well off—well away from a cloister. Interpreters who take the plays as confessionally freighted sometimes (and somewhat carelessly) depict the religion around Shakespeare as clandestinely Catholic, as “an Escher-like world of secret chapels, priest holes, false walls, and trap doors,” which explains how his drama acquired “an exciting marginality.”3 Other interpreters who begin with the plays’ indifference to religion, their fascination with a purportedly Protestant “psychology” of inordinate despair, their disenchantment with older Catholic technologies of salvation, or  their apparent acceptance of an attenuated form of reformed religion depict the religion around Shakespeare—if they bother with it at all— as relatively unremarkable.4 The ways the plays are read (as laments for a religion that was lost or as intrigued, bemused, or cleverly critical {  2  } 

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reactions to the religion Shakespeare found around him) often determines the ways in which the contexts are patched together. The first two “acts” of what follows are different. They stay far from Shakespeare’s plays and try to repossess the religion around the realm as a glover’s apprentice with a lively curiosity—then as an eclectic playwright—might have taken it in. Admittedly, such repossession requires guesswork. We can only imagine how our subject filtered the news that reached him in Stratford-upon-Avon and London, but it seems a safe bet that the seriousness and success of the queen’s courtships, on which the realm’s religious settlement was thought to depend and which seemed to many at the time to be staggeringly significant, also struck Shakespeare as significant. Anxieties about the succession as well as those about possible invasions and insurrections were expressed in sermons that were all but inescapable, as were opinions that there was either too much preaching or too little. We cannot tell what Shakespeare thought about his queen’s matrimonial prospects or about either the content or quantity of sermons. Yet we can recapture, to some extent and with some conjecture, what was heard in Stratford, at the collegiate church of the Holy Trinity. We have auditors’ notes from some sermons and printed scripts for others preached from “the Cross” in St.  Paul’s churchyard, where Shakespeare almost certainly went to leaf through recent arrivals in the yard’s bookstalls, if not also to listen to what was said by or about the preachers. Some of the sermons delivered at St. Saviour’s, within earshot of the Globe Theater, were transcribed, and the transcriptions have survived. And we can infer what Shakespeare heard in the company of so-called church papists, Catholics who attended the realm’s reformed churches, and recusants, Catholics who refused to attend and were fined. He would have come across both types in Stratford, elsewhere in Warwickshire, and in Lancashire, had he repaired to the last, as locals there still claim.5 But Warwickshire was also home to some of the Midlands’ most respected religiously reformed preachers. Stratford was twice visited by leading Calvinist Thomas Cartwright, whose patron, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, owned a castle at Kenilworth, twelve miles away. And Cartwright once arrived with Job Throckmorton, whom conformists i n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

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considered a “sanctified puritane.”6 Elected to Parliament from Warwick in the 1580s, Throckmorton befriended the region’s antipapal polemicists and members of London’s reformist network. At that decade’s end, he was suspected of collaborating with the subversives who pseudonymously published their opposition to conformist bishops and to the prevailing policies and polity of the realm’s reformed church.7 Of course, the presence of ardent Catholics and Calvinists in Shakespeare’s shire could mean little. Judging from the late plays he helped compose, which, as James Holstun notices, “sidestep the theological issues that ripped the country apart,” one might say that, as a Stratford student, apprentice, and aspiring player, Shakespeare recoiled from religious polemics.8 Be that as it may—and even if he self-consciously or subliminally believed the theater was an alternative to the church, a faction-free zone, more peaceful than the clerical estate—his plays are still a source from which we learn much about religious circumstance.9 In the final three, topical chapters, therefore, Religion Around Shakespeare docks evidence drawn from some plays alongside evidence left by preachers, churchwardens, vestrymen, polemicists, theologians, and diarists—but not to seek cover for a new interpretation of those plays. The aim of Religion Around—of all five chapters—is simply to repossess what its title promises. Hence, the last three chapters, on religious authority, religious personality, and religious community, respectively, set a few of Shakespeare’s soliloquies, characters, and caricatures next to relevant contemporary religious developments to illustrate ambivalences. Possibly, they were the playwright’s ambivalences, but I am not prepared to conclude as much. Religion Around argues, instead, that they were atmospheric, which is to claim that many doubts about religious hierarchy and solidarity as well as doubts about election or regeneration were very much in the air in the religion around the realm and, closer, the religion around Shakespeare. The misgivings and doubts spilled across party lines. Mistrust of the Jesuits and of the papacy circulated among both Catholics and Calvinists. Desires for greater discipline were not unique to the precisianists now identified as the most “forward” Protestants (or puritans). Moreover, the aggressiveness of reformists, who were disappointed in the trajectory and pace {  4  } 

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of government-sanctioned reforms, changed over time and from one region to another, as did the remedial measures they favored and conformists’ responses during Queen Elizabeth’s last decade and King James’s first.10 Where did Shakespeare fit? Literary historians looking to out him as a Calvinist or a Catholic or a devotee of some “hybrid faith” should find something of interest here, although what follows will fall short of a definitive answer to their questions. I am not mining for that metal.11 Unquestionably, the playwright borrowed from the religion around him, and what he deposited in his drama “infused” performances, as Leah Marcus says, “with a vitality born of circumstance.” The plays profit from Shakespeare’s “sublimation into high drama of what is casually there at hand.”12 Nonetheless, to proceed from what was “at hand” and what is now staged so often to a singular scribe’s secrets—to his religious convictions—requires a razzle-dazzle that I am inadequately equipped to attempt. Circumstance—the religion around the playwright, not his faith or the plays’ proper interpretations—is my subject. I leave Shakespeare’s outlook to others. My challenge is to see how well we can see what he saw when he looked out.

i n t r o d u c t i o n   { 

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1 religion around

“ It A p p e rt e i n e th to the Em p e r i al l Office” Historian Patrick Collinson suggests that “the succession was the question of questions” in late Tudor England, and I think he is quite right. For Shakespeare, who seems uninterested in the worship of— or administration of—churches around him, religion likely became newsworthy only when the whether and how of its survival in the realm happened to relate to that “question of questions.”1 Other English subjects lavished attention on the fate of their churches, the content of their sermons, and the controversies about their liturgies. They formed factions and registered protests, enlivening the religion around the realm and around Shakespeare. So we should begin by attending to those other subjects. Their story starts for us six years before Shakespeare’s birth when, in 1558, Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister, Mary Tudor, as  England’s queen. Elizabeth I’s mother, Anne Boleyn, was said to have steered her sovereign, then husband, King Henry VIII, toward Protestantism.2 Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife, Katherine of

Aragon, looked to return the realm to Rome but had only five years to undo the work of twenty, and the five were not enough. The religiously reformed, of course, welcomed Queen Mary’s end and Elizabeth’s beginning. Some of them left England during Mary’s short reign, presumably guessing that they would be gone longer. Her death and her half-sister’s succession brought them back; some became their new queen’s new bishops. Robert Horne was named to the see of Winchester and given custody of a few prominent Catholic officials, who, predictably, complained about confinement, their replacements, and the new regime. Horne said that the complainants conspired “to ingrafte in the mindes of subjects a mislikyng of their [new] Queen’s majestie, as though she usurped a power and authoritie in ecclesiastical matters.” He and other exiles-turned-bishops explained, during the early 1560s, that popes were the real usurpers, that “the wylie foxe of Rome,” armed with a “rable of bulls, dispensations, and indulgences,” ruled rulers for centuries. Horne put the reformed alternative succinctly: “It apperteineth to the emperiall office . . . to preserve the estate of God’s holy churches,” and, from late 1558, “it apperteineth” to Elizabeth’s office.3 And she demanded “due obedience.” Many priests acquiesced, perhaps counting on the survival of traditional liturgies or on the short shelf life of alterations proposed by the religiously reformed.4 But some Catholics departed and promptly plotted to return with reinforcements from abroad to topple Elizabeth’s new government. Nicholas Sander, for one, quit Oxford and crossed the Channel while the queen’s Council was finding its feet. He told anyone who would listen that Calvinists in England were few and very unpopular, but two decades passed before he joined an expedition to collect colonists in Ireland for an invasion of the realm he left. Charles Neville, the sixth Earl of Westmoreland, departed for the Continent shortly after his “rising” in the north of England collapsed in 1569. He lived as a pensioner of Spain, scheming to scupper the Tudor regime and religious reforms he despised. Thomas Norton, Neville’s nemesis and an ardent advocate of both the regime and its religious reforms, would rather have had the insurgent earl “preach the right frutes of {  8  } 

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rebellion” from a scaffold, but Westmoreland was safely away when Norton pushed through Parliament statutes, the effect of which was to punish Catholics’ sedition as treason.5 During the deliberations in the Commons, Walter Mildmay, who was chancellor of the exchequer and Norton’s collaborator, complained that all the trouble in England had been “procured” in and by Rome.6 Shakespeare was a teenager then, in 1581. The legislation did not deter Philip Howard, first Earl of Arundel and, Richard Wilson now recalls, the “great hope of Catholic resistance.”7 Howard’s conversion to Catholicism in 1584 was something of a scandal, particularly after he was intercepted while sailing from Sussex the next year. Authorities accused him of planning to collude with fellow fugitives once he landed on the Continent and to offer service to Spanish troops should they agree to invade England. Howard denied it, spent years awaiting trial, then the rest of his life in prison, all the while claiming that he had only wanted to cross the Channel “for his conscience.”8 Conscience versus obedience to the new Tudor sovereign and her bishops: that choice soon faced certain Elizabethan Calvinists as well as their Catholic countrymen, specifically the Protestants who were impatient for sweeping religious reforms. They objected to wearing the surplice and square cap that the new Prayer Book required of the clergy. They complained that standards for candidates for the ministry were too low and that diocesan oversight, which should have ensured clerics’ competence and exemplary conduct, left much to be desired. They wanted to compose and preach sermons rather than read homilies scripted and prescribed by authorities of the established church. Authorities, for their part, tended to answer such criticism by issuing progress reports: any fool could tell, they intimated, that reformed religion was steadily gaining ground, rescuing the realm from “poperie, superstition, and the remaynente of idolatry.” By the 1580s, as a result, the laity was “farre more pliable to all good order than before.”9 But the most ardent Calvinists were hoping for much more than pliable people, who had conformed without being fully reformed; lay pliability signaled the failure, not success, of England’s religious reformation. R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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Thomas Lever tried to get that point across, tried to persuade “pliable people” that “salvation cannot be gotten by man’s works in keeping with the lawe, but it is freely given by God’s grace to the beleevers of the Gospell. The righteousnesse of the lawe of God is so heavie a yowke by reason of the infirmitie of man’s flesh[, but] the glad tidings of the gospell of Christ by reason of the grace of God be so cleere and comfortable unto the faithfull as causeth all things to bee unto them pleasant and profitable.”10 The problem was to circulate that “cleere and comfortable” message, which had traditionally been identified with the Catholic sacraments widely “understood to be sanctifying signs that caused what they signified.”11 The ministry was understaffed, and the presence of many priests, lately turned Protestants, posed another problem for the recently repatriated reformers. Lever, for one, mistrusted the ministry around Coventry and appointed lay lectors to lead worship in several parishes.12 Some of the new queen’s new bishops licensed itinerant preachers to go “up and downe the countrie as apostles,” to make sure the gospel’s “glad tidings” were compellingly delivered. However, Diocesan officials heard word that itinerants were overcharging for their services.13 Lay lectors, moreover, took it upon themselves to appoint replacements, in effect undermining diocesan supervision. Even as time passed and as the settled ministry was better staffed, pastors complained that parishioners were indifferent and undisciplined. Some reformers noticed that their sermons proclaiming that salvation was freely given to the faithful only infrequently had the desired effect of inspiring gratitude and of leading to lasting, meaningful improvements in the laity’s behavior. Settled pastors were known to envy itinerants, who—encountering opposition, listlessness, or mindless conformity—had the option to move on.14 To others, who were generally satisfied with the pace of reform, conformity was of paramount importance. Acknowledging that results were sometimes spotty, these satisfied others nonetheless insisted that orderly progress could be made—with less confusion and less rancor—if the critics of the established church would only cease carping at bishops and their deputies and stop pressing for the immediate implementation in England of protocols of select Swiss or south German reformed churches. {  10  } 

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Historians once called persons satisfied with the progress of reform in England Anglicans and dissatisfied persons puritans, but revisionists objected to the old categories and were right to do so. Jacobethan reformed religious commitments were too complicated to fit into the Anglican/puritan grid. What followed its disaccreditation, however, was a contagious logophobia; many historians resisted naming attitudes toward reform for fear of inappropriately tidying up and of creating coherent factions where there was considerable confusion. Charles Prior has come up with what I think is a useful solution. He describes those satisfied with the pace and trajectory of the realm’s reform as “conformists,” because their expressions of satisfaction were accompanied by arguments for conformity as well as for patience. Prior’s “reformists,” however, were “anxious to put forth detailed reasons” for ongoing reformation. The conformists’ Prayer Book, they said, savored of Catholicism; episcopacy was obsolete (and, more important, unscriptural).15 I have adopted Prior’s solution, recycling his terms, “conformist” and “reformist,” to denote levels of satisfaction with the progress of reform in the religion around Shakespeare. But, unlike Prior, I retain the term “puritan” to refer to the religiously reformed who internalized dissatisfaction—pietists in England who became “their own greatest accusers,” as Richard Greenham urged.16 Puritans, in this application, therefore, are Calvinist pietists, whose sense of how a church’s ministry and discipline might be improved was determined by their dedication to turning parishioners into prodigal souls. In that respect, puritans, as  we shall see, were remarkably similar to Catholic pietists whose devotional literature was bent on restructuring Christians’ desires by raising questions about the quality of their repentance.17 Puritans’ strategy was to throw more sermons at the realm’s religious problems. The objective was to extinguish England’s attachment to Roman religion and to awaken “drowsy” Calvinists.18 Puritans relied on preaching to prompt conflict, which was more desirable than conformity as long as the realm’s reformation was still a work in progress. And progress was possible only if conflicts between reformed Christians’ regenerate and unregenerate impulses or inclinations threw into greater relief the contrast between the reformed and unreformed practices in their churches. The latter thrived on complacency R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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and were said to “oppresse grievously” the “zealous love for the gospell” that ought to inspire the faithful.19 To puritan Josias Nichols, that love was kindled (and kept alight) by “simple preaching . . . so mightie that it changeth the nature of a man to bee an other than hee was before, namelie, to turn from damme idols to serve the living God.” Six months of sermons—two or three a week—will “pearce” the heart, predicted Nichols, and should inspire commitments characteristic of a truly reformed faith.20 Historians have collected pastors’ complaints that parishioners ordinarily favored calm and compromise; they were reluctant to pluck at their consciences and have their hearts “pearced.”21 Reformist Stephen Egerton, less of a complainer than some colleagues, took what could be construed as preemptive measures. He urged members of his congregation in London to bring their familiars within earshot of his “pearcing” preaching. “It is not enough . . . to come and present ourselves,” he told heads of households, “but also to bring . . . our children and servants, even the meanest among them.”22 The chance to inspire infra-personal conflicts and to sustain them along with a parishioner’s intolerance for all unreformed practices must not be missed, puritans maintained; given “this colde and frozen age of ours, [one is] loth to kill any zeal.”23 Others in England liked sacraments better than sermons: expatriate priests and Jesuits who, from the late 1570s, secretly returned to England; resident recusants who welcomed and hid them from authorities; and an assortment of conformists as well. Most reformists, particularly the puritans, took fondness for sacraments to be characteristic of unreformed religion. Baptisms and Eucharists without preaching, “the principall part of [reformists’] ministry,” were “polluted”; “as the seale without the writing, so itt is nothing for the sacrament without the sermon within it.”24 So the reformists argued, and one of their petitions went so far as to identify sermons as “the only meanes whereby [God’s] kingdome is established.”25 But the conformists answered that frequency was the enemy of quality and that the insistence on more preaching encouraged the realm’s preachers to “handle matters verie rawlie” in the pulpit.26 Several years (and pamphlets) into his controversy with reformist Thomas Cartwright, John Whitgift, later bishop of Worcester—the {  12  } 

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diocesan with jurisdiction over reformed church discipline in Shakespeare’s Stratford—noted that “none” of his conformist colleagues “denyeth that hearing the Worde of God is the usual and ordinarie meanes . . . God useth to worke faythe in us and that therefore preachers be necessarie.” Still, he all but endorsed the remark that “the whole of London” could be well served by just four industrious preachers: “If any hath sayd that some of those which use to preach often by their loose negligente, verball, and unlearned sermons have brought the word of God into contempte, or that foure godlie learned, pithy, diligent, and discreet preachers might do more good in London than forty contentious, unlearned, verball, and rashe preachers, they have said truely and their saying myghte well be justifyed.”27 Later and throughout his career—in Worcester and, from 1583, as archbishop of Canterbury—Whitgift contended that it was unreasonable to expect a sermon with every sacrament. Such frequency would leave preachers no time for other pastoral work. Whitgift also held that each bishop ought to be trusted to make determinations about the quality and quantity of the pulpit oratory in his diocese and that episcopal discretion was by far the most important element in the formulation and implementation of policies for the administration and reform of the church. But many reformists wanted local congregations to have the final say, assuming that reformed, right-minded parishioners, whose “eies [were] opened from darknes to light” by “simple preaching,” could provide for their own edification. They would comprehend, for example, that ceremonies dazzled rather than informed. They would also “discerne by” that “light,” puritans predicted, that “the true church” ought not to concentrate power in the hands of bishops.28 Implacable reformists insisted that bishops cared more for their estates, revenues, and respectability than for parishioners’ regeneration. Bishops promoted pluralism, turning a blind eye, according to their critics, to the exceptionally poor service that parishes received when an incumbent in one had other parishes to serve. But to excuse pluralism, conformist bishops and their apologists explained that “petit and meane salarie[s]” on offer in the smaller parishes were insufficient to stock pastors’ studies—not to mention their cupboards. Poverty kept the best and brightest from the ministry.29 Conformists R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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conceded that pluralism, if left unmonitored, would become “the very cut-throate of the preaching of the gospel,” although they were confident that the bishops and their deputies would recognize and remedy abuses promptly and that the church could afford some pluralists too busy to preach as often as reformists required. Conformists said that sermons in strategic locations would suffice. There was nothing in the Bible about putting pulpits in every parish. Besides, for centuries, England had a number of parishes thirty or forty miles across, much larger than any two or three parishes served by Jacobethan preachers.30 But reformists were unimpressed by conformists’ history lessons. Dudley Fenner, probably the most highly regarded theologian among the dissidents in the 1580s, held that no Christian in a reformed church ought to “goe above five myle to hear a sermon.”31 For it would be a shame to deprive a religion of the Word of the Word— namely, of the gospels’ “glad tidings” intimately as well as learnedly, eloquently, and, above all, frequently preached. When “want of maintenance” became a sticking point in small parishes, parishioners, “eies opened,” reformists claimed, would find solutions that fit local circumstances without sacrificing sermons.32 To conformists, such confidence in local improvisation was silly and sometimes sinister. They suspected reformists’ lay patrons of plotting parish coups. If parishes were kept small and “maintenance” modest, few competent and commanding figures would stay in the ministry. The exodus of the best would enable lay elites to capture control, and the underpaid, overworked pastors who remained would prove to be no match for parishes’ lay leadership intending to experiment with unorthodox administrative arrangements that empowered sheep to hire or fire their shepherds. So, all the reformists’ talk of sermons and size seemed subversive to conformists.33 From the 1580s, highly placed conformists continued to question their critics’ motives and methods. Reformists were reputed to love to argue, to be “in great choller,” and to “wear[y] themselves in factious discourse.”34 John Aylmer, Whitgift’s principal coadjutor, had been one of those allegedly choleric critics in the 1560s but confided that his opposition to episcopacy at the time had been a symptom of {  14  } 

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sickness; he spoke intemperately about episcopacy in a fit and while “braynsick.”35 He recovered and joined other conformists—“Judases,” according to many reformists, diocesan officials who “maime and deforme the Body of Christ.”36 Peter Lake now senses “resentment” and “desperation” in those accusations, for the 1580s were not going at all well for the bishops’ critics. Their petitions in Parliament were regularly rejected, their patrons at Court were dying, and Whitgift was named to the queen’s Council. Reformists were losing what little leverage they had while conformists positioned themselves to influence significantly—and to their critics’ disadvantage—what “apperteineth to the emperiall office.”37 Resentment and desperation prompted barbed editorials on the established church and its leadership that issued from dissidents’ secret presses in late 1588 and 1589. A fictive, irreverent, and witty vigilante, Martin Marprelate, hurled insults at the more prominent conformists, a few of whom commissioned pamphleteers to respond in kind. Whitgift and his conformist colleagues also set out to persuade the government to consider martinists as dangerous as “massing priests,” who were still pouring into England and supposedly planning to escort the realm back to Rome and to give it over to Spain.38 Richard Bancroft can be said to have captained the anti-martinist enterprise. He had a reputation for effectively suppressing subversives. Whitgift reported how diligently Bancroft had been in Bury, silencing reformist preachers and magistrates.39 Felicity Heal now calls him the regime’s Rottweiler, referring to his ferocious defense of the realm’s established church’s interests. He was especially good at disarranging the affairs of forward Calvinists and lay-low Catholics.40 He supported the appellants among the latter, a faction of Catholic accommodationists, who labored to discredit the English Jesuits. Bancroft also wrote against the reformists, equating their religious disaffection with political disloyalty. In sum, he assiduously guarded against having the authority that “apperteineth,” by statute, to Jacobethan government and to the religious establishment removed to Rome or—what seemed likelier if the queen’s subjects fell under the spell of the puritans’ religion around Shakespeare—transferred to local congregations.41 R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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We have summoned specimens of the sentiments of conformists, reformists, puritans, and Catholics into something of a staging area, because it seemed prudent to start studying the religion around the realm with manageable, if misleadingly tidy, classifications. Moreover, introductions and preliminary classifications of this sort should prove useful as we attend to various confessionally freighted developments that were sufficiently sensational to give pause to a curious, perceptive, accomplished playwright: Queen Elizabeth’s apparent antagonism to preaching; anxieties about the succession stirred by her courtships; the detention in England of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; the saber rattling that accompanied nearly all late Tudor references to Spain; the Essex insurgency; efforts to enlighten the new king, James I, in and after 1603; and the “powder plot.”

“ I n T hes e Doubtful l Tym es” In 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated the queen of England. To her religiously reformed subjects, the bull relaying Rome’s verdict, Regnans in Excelsis, was “directly contrary to God’s word.” Pius and many of his predecessors “dreamed” that they were “supreame monarch[s] of the world” with power to “loose” or separate subjects from their sovereigns. But it was a “blasphemous” dream; on that, conformists and reformists agreed.42 The fallout from Regnans should have favored reformists, who had long complained about conformists’ “papistrie.” But the realm’s conformist bishops gravely labored to distinguish their position from that of their medieval and papist predecessors, whose loyalties were often split between monarch and pope. The queen’s bishops were the queen’s—and were angry when reformist rivals implied otherwise. Even Edmund Grindal, as sympathetic with reformists’ protests for more preaching as any highly placed prelate—and more sympathetic than most—came to dislike what looked to be lodged in the “busy head” of the Cambridge controversialist Thomas Cartwright, which was “stuffed” with “singularities,” with ominously odd ideas about church government. Cartwright had complained about “lordly” {  16  } 

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bishops as if he and reformist friends had not gotten their livings and licenses to preach from such domineering diocesan executives. Such sauce!43 But licenses of outspoken dissidents were often suspended, and bishops deprived many reformist critics of their livings. Yet, notwithstanding suspensions and deprivations, authorities were incapable of regulating everything said from the pulpits. As the bishop of London, Edwin Sandys was responsible for selecting the ministers to preach at St. Paul’s Cross and announced his intention to exclude “fanaticall spirits.” But an occasional preacher there scandalized crowds, Sandys irritably admitted, because his fellow bishops had not adequately screened the candidates they recommended to him.44 Sandys is an enigmatic figure. Although he tried to cork criticism coming from the pulpits, reformists had reason to reserve him a place alongside Grindal as one of preaching’s most devoted episcopal advocates. For, during the 1570s, Sandys developed “evasive tactics” to save the sermons that were the centerpieces of the in-service training exercises called prophecies when the queen and regime initially tried to suppress them. Prophesying, at that time, had both a public and a private phase. Crowds in some market towns listened to consecutive sermons on an identical biblical passage, after which the clergy from the region assembled privately to swap comments and, presumably, suggestions for improvements. Sandys seems to have agreed with patrons of prophesying who claimed that candid exchanges about exegesis could only improve preaching in the parishes. Grindal— of whom more in a moment—was opposed to calling a halt.45 Regnans, the pope’s excommunication, after all, made it imperative to get religiously reformed responses to “papistry” into market-day conversations, if  only because the Christians from the realm’s “blynde corners”—that is, from parishes without curates or with curates who rarely, if ever, preached—would take in more Catholic propaganda than Protestant preaching, were the exercises or prophecies they overheard on their trips to market suspended or suppressed.46 But the queen and her Council were told that preachers removed from their pulpits for having criticized the established church had taken advantage of the opportunities prophesying afforded to cram R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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market-day sermons with invective and to impress passersby with everything that they thought wrong with the established church. In  1574, Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, ordered the exercises in Norfolk discontinued, claiming the diocese was infested with “puritaynes.”47 The following year, Richard Fletcher, while visiting a parish in Parker’s diocese served by his father, heard laymen, “in  exercise,” complain about the ministry. The younger Fletcher fretted that prophecies encouraged “every artificer” to play “reformer and teacher.” Any “pragmaticall prentise” apparently could pronounce on “the government and reformation of the church.”48 Prophesying was common in Leicestershire, a day’s ride from Stratford and Shakespeare. Eusebius Paget, known for his acerbic editorials on episcopacy and suspended from the ministry in 1571 and 1574, preached during other exercises at Southam, Warwickshire, closer to the bard-to-be. Shakespeare was still young, yet it would have been hard for him to have missed the splash that Grindal made when, almost immediately after succeeding Parker as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576, he fell from favor, attempting to save the prophecies. He claimed that his suffragans could supervise prophecies and would prohibit “immodest speech” and “irreverent gesture.” “Worldly-minded” “mislikers of godly reformation,” he averred, despised prophesying because their sins were the subjects of the barbed public sermons.49 But four of Grindal’s fellow bishops categorically refused to endorse his spirited counteroffensive against the exercises’ most unreserved critics. Those four were joined by John Aylmer, archdeacon of Lincoln, who named Gilby and Paget as the principal mischief makers during market-day oratory. Gilby circulated a list of officials’ “corruptions”; Paget depicted the realm’s bishops as “Pharisees.”50 The queen ordered that “assemblies callid exercises cease and not be usid.”51 Grindal objected and berated her, proclaiming that a prince’s proper place was within and not above the church, an opinion that killed his career. He was sequestered and kept from Court, forgotten by power brokers. Aylmer, succeeding Sandys as bishop of London in 1577, took on a number of Grindal’s responsibilities, nominating the Court preachers and presiding over the Ecclesiastical {  18  } 

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Commission. Prophecies were suppressed, resurfacing in some places as clerical conferences with reduced emphasis on the public phase. We know that Aylmer was especially vigilant. He wanted no defiance of the queen’s cease-and-desist on his watch. As a precaution, he arrested Thomas Randolph, who was visiting London from Oxford, where he was known in 1578 to be preaching enthusiastically “touchynge that which they call exercise.”52 Randolph was released, yet the intimidation and incarceration look to have had the intended prophylactic effect. Critics of the conformists reported that a “hush” in Aylmer’s precincts replaced the sounds of a truly reformed religion at work.53 But things could change in an instant, and Aylmer would have been well aware of that. During the 1540s and early 1550s, he talked regularly with leading evangelical reformers who came to England from the Continent at the invitation of Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury. Aylmer was impressed, figuring that England had become a model as well as a magnet for reformers. Then King Edward VI died before reaching the age of twenty, and his half-sister, Mary Tudor, took over. She labored to make England Catholic again. Aylmer left. Five years later, when news of Mary’s death and Elizabeth’s succession reached him in Saxony, he returned to England and wrote ecstatically about “the divine and godly majestie” that the new ruler of the realm possessed. He came within a millimeter of worshipping her, allowing that the Persians, although they overdid it a bit, had the right idea, falling “flat on their faces before theyr sovereign.” “Thynges would grow to confusion,” Aylmer suggested, unless subjects’ respect for their new queen’s title and supremacy was unstinting.54 That was 1559; Elizabeth was twenty-five years young. Each of her two immediate predecessors, Edward VI and Mary I, had only five or so years to reshape religious policy, but Elizabeth seemed robust enough to make a long run and a large family. Still, in the 1570s, she turned forty and more, unmarried, and her heir apparent was a Catholic, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, all of which made Elizabeth’s religiously reformed advisers apprehensive. They heard about Masses in Mary’s chapel and were frightened by what her militant and ultra-Catholic kin in France, the Guises, might be planning. Reformists and R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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conformists at Court comprehended how completely the fate of their faith “apperteineth to the emperiall office.” So they tried to exclude Mary from the succession and to prevent the two royal cousins from meeting.55 William Cecil, Elizabeth’s principal secretary, later Lord Burghley, and his ardently reformist colleagues at Court were determined to ruin Mary Stuart’s chances and were assisted, to that end, by the Queen of Scots herself, who, husband hunting, set her sights on the son of King Philip II of Spain. Philip had married Mary Tudor more than fifteen years before and was thus associated with her persecution of the realm’s religiously reformed subjects. Hence, he was terribly unpopular in Elizabeth’s England. Moreover, Mary Stuart’s suspected complicity in her second husband’s murder and her affair with a married man who became her third scandalized Elizabeth. Reports execrating the Queen of Scots spread south, where English Scots-watchers learned about her “outragious crueltie,” “unappeisabill haitrent,” and “plane trecherie.” Cecil, one sees, had help.56 Mary Stuart fled to England in 1568, following her partisans’ defeat in the Scottish civil wars. She could not be repatriated without discouraging England’s allies there who had seized the advantage over the pro-French faction—sure beneficiaries, if the Queen of Scots were to go home. But her residence (or, to be precise, her confinement) in the north of England created problems for Elizabeth’s government and church. Catholics there showed signs that Mary’s presence had them looking past Elizabeth. Neither she nor her Council, particularly Cecil, appreciated having a rival so close. Shakespeare was too young to have taken in Mary Stuart’s having been taken in, but certainly what followed—intrigue, romance, rebellion, and death—was talked about long after. Schemes to rescue her proliferated from the time of her arrival to that of her execution in 1587. Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, meant to marry her, acquire immense influence as lover of the next-in-line, and displace William Cecil as Elizabeth’s most trusted. Mary liked the idea and applied to the pope to have her most recent (third) marriage annulled, but Elizabeth, who learned of her cousin’s courtship late in the game, thought that Cecil was not the only one whom the two planned to displace. {  20  } 

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And Tudor courtiers may have thought the planned usurpation plausible rather than preposterous, knowing what historians have lately rediscovered—specifically, that Elizabethan Catholicism was “vigorous” and not “moribund.”57 Norfolk’s friends in the north, fearing that they would become casualties when their queen turned on the duke and his intended, rose preemptively in rebellion in 1569 and were swiftly routed. Trials of the propertied, papist rebels were delayed while Elizabeth’s lawyers and Bishop Pilkington of Durham squabbled about the spoils of war, but hundreds of humbler rebels promptly were executed.58 Norfolk did not directly participate in the insurrection, so he was released soon after his arrest. But Mary’s overtures continued, and after Elizabeth was excommunicated in 1570, King Philip II of Spain stepped smartly into the conspiracy. He promised to ferry a small army from the Netherlands to reinforce the English Catholics once Elizabeth was captured or killed, Mary freed, and Norfolk wed to her.59 But Norfolk was rearrested and executed. Mary was spared, inasmuch as Cecil was unable to shake Elizabeth’s conviction that evidence of her cousin’s complicity was insufficient to kill a queen. The Queen of Scots remained in custody for the next sixteen years. Cecil and Francis Walsingham, who became what we might call the realm’s foreign secretary and secretary of defense as well as the regime’s chief intelligence officer, tried to isolate her diplomatically while doubling their efforts to find Elizabeth a suitable husband. The best candidate was Henry, Duke of Anjou and younger brother of France’s King Charles IX, although their indomitable mother, Catherine de Medici, mistrusted the English. And the English Calvinists mistrusted the French, particularly Anjou, who had quartered with Mary Stuart’s Guiscard uncles, regarded by many on both sides of the Channel as Henry’s “handlers.” Nonetheless, Cecil warmed to the possibility of a wedding and a French alliance, whereas influential others on Elizabeth’s Council were opposed to it.60 Treasuring “the quieteness” of her estate, which depended, she thought, on her religiously reformed subjects’ obedience, the queen made a point of refusing consent to Anjou’s stipulation that, “at his coming,” he and his attendants be permitted to hear Masses. But R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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Elizabeth enjoined Walsingham to be emphatic during prenuptial negotiations so that there might be “no misconceiving gathered of our answer whereby the duke might hope of a sufferance.” Word got out, and public debate followed. One anonymous pamphleteer, who favored the Anjou match, inferred from the apostle Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians to “give no offense” that the queen “may tolerate Mass” to indulge the weak. But Elizabeth concluded differently. She agreed that other rituals might be observed if Anjou’s attendants were discreet; they “shall not be molested,” she pledged, but the Mass was “repugnant to the Church of God,” “to the Word of God.”61 Elizabeth was not in an ecumenical mood. She restated her terms: as soon “as Monsieur will forbear the Mass, she will assent to the marriage.”62 But Monsieur would not “forbear,” and when the duke dug in, his mother and brother supported him. Then, startlingly, Queen Catherine offered her youngest son, François Hercule, Duke of Alençon. Elizabeth was twenty years older than the new Valois candidate, who, being further down the line of succession in France, might be persuaded that a realm across the Channel was worth relinquishing the Mass. But the English Calvinists may have had a different reason for welcoming Alençon to England. Mary Stuart wrote letters to Elizabeth and others that made it clear what the realm would get, should some mishap carry off the reigning queen. Mary confided that the Catholic Church was her chief consolation in 1571.63 Predictably, the religiously reformed at Court, unconsoled by Mary’s consolations, believed that a young, impressionable French husband was preferable to a robustly aggrieved Scottish Catholic queen. The Earl of Leicester, for one, was encouraged to perceive a “full determination in her Majestie to like of” her new option.64 “Full determination”? We know that Elizabeth lavishly entertained French envoys who formally put Alençon’s proposal, but there is no telling how close she came to accepting it, for, as Shakespeare neared adolescence, she was learning to become a grand master of matrimonial deliberations.65 Her conduct mystified her courtiers at the time and scholars thereafter, although she gave every indication of anticipating a first meeting with François Hercule when a shocking “accident” in France left thousands of Calvinists dead. Thomas {  22  } 

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Smith, from Paris, referred to the slaughter in August 1772 as an accident, to suggest that the murders were sudden and unpremeditated.66 The French Court expressed outrage, yet word circulated in France and across the Channel that Catherine and King Charles approved the massacre and might also have orchestrated it. English reformists thought the Valois capable of such cruelty—“beastlie butcherie.”67 Whatever the extent of Valois complicity, refugees arriving in England told stories of French Calvinists’ suffering that put conversations with Alençon’s agents on hold. From the English Protestants’ perspective, the massacres put the Valois Court on the wrong side of the Reformation, and that development moved the Earl of Leicester, patron of some of the realm’s outspoken reformists, to press his suit. He staged erotic entertainments during Elizabeth’s visit in 1575 to his castle at Kenilworth, fifteen miles from Stratford and young Shakespeare, entertainments that probably passed then—and are regarded now—as an “elaborate allegorical proposal of marriage.”68 But the queen rejected Leicester’s offer and encouraged her young French suitor to try again. For Alençon’s stock was rising steeply among the religiously reformed in England. He became the new Anjou as soon as his brother succeeded Charles as King Henry III, and he was known to have helped French Calvinists extort Valois concessions. True, he was also infamous for subsequently abandoning them, but English reformers were unprepared to despair of him as an altogether unsuitable suitor. For one thing, he was much less resolutely Roman Catholic than his brother Henry had been during previous prenuptial negotiations. Alençon/Anjou, moreover, was making friends of the Calvinist insurgents in the Low Countries, who played a critical role in England’s defense by distracting the Spanish. Possibly Elizabeth figured that she, the religiously reformed in her company, and their rebellious Dutch coreligionists fighting King Philip’s forces and regents could convert the new Anjou, promising him power he could never hope to possess while his brother lived.69 It seemed necessary to preoccupy the Spanish in the Netherlands, because any peace favorable to Spain there would tempt Philip and his most aggressive regent, Don John of Austria, to send troops to England to liberate Mary Stuart.70 She was waiting for R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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just that, berating would-be rescuers who, to her mind, had been “deferring the matter so long.” Her letters—reprimanding, pleading, and coaxing—were often intercepted. In late 1578, “confidences” she composed helped Cecil, Leicester, and Walsingham dramatize the danger to Elizabeth and impress upon her the need to increase her “gracious assistance” to the Dutch. Gradually and grudgingly, those three advisors—Walsingham, last of all—also came to see the advantages of having Anjou participate, as Elizabeth’s surrogate, across the Channel.71 But developing indifference to her Valois suitor’s Catholicism and the English Court’s effort to sanitize his reputation, which perplexed expatriate Catholics on the Continent, worried ardent reformists in England.72 After all, the new Anjou was “a spark” from the French “family which hath been a firebrand in Europe”—no friend to advocates of reformed religion and utterly untrustworthy in foreign affairs. So said John Stubbs in what Walsingham called a “lewde booke lately published”; Stubbs’s implacable, influential critic thought the book subversive as well as lewd because it was sure to provoke reformist preachers to “intermeddle” in “matters of state not incident to their profession and callinge.”73 Perhaps at her Court’s urging, Elizabeth invited Anjou for an intimate interview and suggested secrecy. The duke came incognito but word got out, and the anti-Anjou literature did as well, warning that England was being “swallowed” by France. Stubbs made much of the secrecy; he complained that the new Anjou was practicing an “unmanlike, unprincelike . . . fearful, suspicious, disdainful, needy, French kind of wooing.” His “lewd book” claimed that the proposed marriage “was the straightest line that can be drawn from Rome to the utter ruin of our church.”74 Richard Cox, bishop of Ely, who experienced firsthand the disagreements dividing reformers during the Marian exile, on their return, and for the next twenty years, claimed that the match would be yet another doloris causa, another reason for Calvinists to grieve.75 Cox was discreet. Stubbs published and had his hand severed as punishment for sedition. Philip Sydney ventured to protest—but delicately. His appeal to Elizabeth mentioned “the knot of religion” in England that, for nearly three decades, all but choked the realm, until Elizabeth, after sifting the “two mighty factions,” committed {  24  } 

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herself to the cause of reform. From the 1560s, her realm’s religiously reformed had counted on her leadership. How could she, “without excessive trouble, pull out of the party so long maintained”? It had developed into “your chief, if not your sole strength,” Sidney told her. “How [Calvinists’] hearts will be galled, if not aliened when they shall see you take to husband a Frenchman and a papist.”76 When the queen finally ended the decade-long courtship with François Hercule d’Valois, she expressed regret that enduring opposition from the reformed “faction” had trumped her great affection for her suitor. But Spain’s ambassador to England, Bernard de Mendoza, detected little regret and hardly any affection; there had been more feigning than feeling, he reported, when the queen and duke discussed and dissolved their engagement.77 Many reformists were relieved to see the back of the latter, although they favored his ambitions to continue campaigning against Spanish forces in the Low Countries. (Their feelings were shared by the Dutch commander, Prince William, long after Anjou’s imprudence and impatience— as  well as the Francophobia in several parts of the Low Countries— made him something of a liability.)78 Elizabeth seemed content with the result. She turned churlish when her subjects presumed to offer premarital counseling.79 And conversations about the succession, which invariably accompanied speculation about plausible husbands, were unwelcome. They were especially untimely during “doubtfull tymes,” that is, after Mary, Queen of Scots, escaped to England—and while “seminarie men” and “massing priests” traveled through the realm and agitated against Elizabeth’s settlement of religion. She and Calvinists at Court were convinced that expatriate priests returned to England in the late 1570s and the 1580s to implement regime change. Young Shakespeare may have heard about their intrigues—or have heard them intrigue— as they passed through Warwickshire on their way to more hospitable territory to the north. One of their Northamptonshire hosts, Thomas Tresham, tried to calm government fears. Expatriates—many of them Jesuits—had more to fear from the late Tudor administration, he said, than Tudor officials had to fear from them: “massing priests” and missionaries, Tresham elaborated, were “lambs among wolves.”80 R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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Perhaps Tresham knew that Jesuit missionaries’ commissions explicitly prohibited them from commenting on England’s politics, on the road and even in reports they sent to Rome. But the realm’s reformers equated the Jesuits’ mission with espionage. To refortify the old faith was to discountenance the new and to sabotage church reform and political regime. Before Tresham offered his line on “lambs,” pamphleteer William Charke announced that whoever “smiteth our [reformed] religion woundeth our commonwealth.”81 Richard Bancroft explained that Jesuits were executed for “moving her Majestie’s subjects to rebellion,” not for religious conviction.82 Captured Jesuits were said to be particularly dangerous. During interrogations, they pretended to be curious about the arguments for reform to get interrogators to identify texts they trusted, whereupon the interrogated would smuggle the titles to eager collaborators who relayed them to Rome so that the next Catholic council could condemn the authors and burn their books. And, during arguments, Jesuits and other missionaries allegedly challenged religiously reformed interrogators to demonstrate that doctrinal declarations that the “true” church was invisible did not preclude responsible management of congregations’ affairs. When proof was provided and valued, visible leaders of reformed congregations on the Continent were named, the Catholics passed along that information as well, turning admired advocates of reform into targets. The conclusion to be drawn from such tales: the missionaries and “massing priests” were shrewd, treacherous villains, even when apprehended.83 On the loose, they were doubly dangerous predators who stalked entire households and “devour[ed] parents, children, masters, and servants.” A  comprehensive crackdown was called for, according to Bishop Tobie Matthew; how sad, he said, that conformists and reformists in the realm relentlessly quarreled with each other while England was infested with papists! How could the religiously reformed watch without wailing (ingemiscere) while predatory missionaries made a meal of the realm’s families and turned them back to Catholicism?84 Enough wailing survives in sermons and pamphlets to suggest that it was an important part of the reformed religion around the realm. And the regime considered it necessary to keep close watch on prominent {  26  } 

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Catholics’ estates to prohibit politically subversive cults from forming, even when Jesuits and other missionaries were not present. The queen’s bishops’ agents combed the countryside for mementos of the expatriates’ missions, cherished in Catholics’ households as if they were relics of saints. Might Catholic families compose “a partie strong at home” ready to assist invaders—“divers princes Catholike”—to free the Queen of Scots from prison and place her on the throne?85 To prevent that fifth column from rising, the queen’s Council routinely “call[ed] principall recusantes out of their country” and settled them far from neighbors. Thomas Tresham, for example, was taken from his home and confined in Ely, where the bishop’s facilities, along with Nicholas Bacon’s castle, were converted into prisons.86 The wardens there and elsewhere were warned to “abstain from angry and opprobrious words,” for insults would only stiffen the prisoners’ “obstinacie,” which recusants misconstrued as “constancie,” as divinely inspired courage and thus as proof of the rectitude of the Catholics’ cause.87 Elizabeth received at least one memorandum urging moderation as well; it promised that Jesuits’ “credit will soone quaile” if the realm’s authorities, “from the highest counselor to the lowest constable,” would only see to it that laws requiring subjects to attend reformed churches and attend to sermons were strictly enforced. “For my part,” the author confided, revealing sentiments that would pass today as enlightened, “I wish no lessening of their number, but by preaching.”88 Yet, notwithstanding the admirable wish of that unidentified adviser, arrest, confinement, interrogation, torture, and sometimes the gallows constituted the fate of many expatriates on their return. Walsingham deployed a platoon of spies on both sides of the Channel, so the missionaries were wise to travel disguised. Their secrecy and that of their hosts, of course, made their mission seem more sinister to Calvinists. And captured missionaries contributed, to that end, by insisting, during interrogations, that popes possessed power “generally to discharge any Christian prince’s subjects” of their duty to obey their sovereigns. Calvinists’ antagonism and fears only increased on hearing the Jesuits’ various, ostensibly evasive replies to interviewers’ standard question, as when Christopher Southworthe, under arrest in R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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1579, “answereth that he cannot tell what he shoulde or woulde do” in the event of an invasion.89 Edmund Campion, in  1581, could not promise to “take the queen’s parte.” He could only say that he would pray that Catholicism prevailed.90 Religiously reformed pamphleteers worried that the expatriate missionaries’ disaffection could go viral. They worried as well that the missionaries’ “false face of holiness” would incline less zealous and less insightful Calvinists to overlook their “underminings of our good subjects.” Expatriate Catholic “seminarie men,” returning from the Continent and journeying from shire to shire, “train” the laity “to  treason.”91 Caught encouraging the trainers and trainees, Mary Stuart was unrepentant. Walsingham tried to persuade his queen to make her cousin pay the ultimate price for her conspiring with the Catholic subversives, but Elizabeth did not wish to learn how Europe’s princes might “stand affected” if she and England resorted to regicide: “Shall their pittie be extended to the guilty”?92 Yet Mary’s complicity in what proved to be her last bid to be rid of Elizabeth sealed her fate. By 1586, her stature was significantly diminished. Her son had come of age and, as King James VI of Scotland, had “demoted” his mother. Mary was no longer Queen of Scots; she was queen mother. And James’s signature on a treaty with Elizabeth, John Guy says, made his mother “disposable.” More desperate— and hence more explicitly than in earlier correspondence—Mary consented when approached by would-be assassins. Walsingham, who may have cooked up the conspiracy to incriminate her, at the very least let it develop to a point. Elizabeth was briefed and, in 1587, reluctantly acquiesced to having her cousin executed. Mary died, ready, she proclaimed, to make the supreme sacrifice “for the restoration of the Catholic church.”93 It is still difficult to tell how many of Elizabeth’s subjects yearned for that “restoration” in the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was settling in London. Thirty or so years earlier, Catholic resurgence might not have required colossal effort; the established English reformed church had only a tenuous hold over the imaginations of influential and affluent laymen. But three decades of reformed preaching and polemics seem to have taken a toll on Catholic sentiment. {  28  } 

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Calculating that toll with precision, however, is impossible. It may well be, as James McDermott thinks, that those years of reformation, counter-reformation, and conspiracy merely made “most Englishmen believe it was better to have a single religion, and that someone else should decide which one.”94

“ Ou rs W e re b u t Fi she r - B oats” King Philip  II of Spain did not bother to hide his desire to become that “someone else.” He offered himself as husband to Elizabeth soon after Mary Tudor’s death left him a widower, but his unpopularity in England made acceptance of that offer unlikely. So, when Mary Stuart fled from Scotland and settled to its south in the late 1560s, Philip appeared content to support her candidacy. English sources reported that his endorsement of Mary Stuart’s schemes for the “deprivation, death, and destruction” of her cousin was unfaltering.95 England retaliated, as we learned, by encouraging and subsidizing rebellious Dutch subjects and by turning a blind eye as English privateers pilfered Spanish cargoes in the Atlantic. The undeclared war on Spanish trade incensed Philip, yet, as long as the Queen of Scots lived, he was patient, trusting that his problem with Elizabeth’s regime would be solved without direct Hapsburg intervention. But his patience died with Mary. He ordered his admirals to assemble an armada and asked his Guiscard allies in France to secure ports on their side of the Channel and to prepare to reprovision his fleet. And he told his commander and regent in the Low Countries, the Duke of Parma, to have troops ready to be ferried to England. Calvinists in England saw Rome’s hand in the plan. Thomas Rogers fumed that “Spaine loveth this whore,” the Church of Rome.96 Historians, however, ordinarily acquit Pope Sixtus  V of having prodded King Philip to invade. Indeed, the consensus is that Philip persuaded the pope that Elizabeth’s England was ripe for the picking. Sixtus, of course, supported Spain’s initiatives in 1588, and the English assumed that their Catholic countrymen would do so as well. Local officials were ordered to arrest Catholics whose “obstinacie of R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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errour” would lead them to make common cause with the invaders.97 But at least one crew of officials confided that “the more obstinate or less is a thing most hard for us to set down.”98 Local authorities, that is, seemed to be groping for standards to measure loyalty in advance of a crisis that could test them. Alexandra Walsham now calculates that for every persistent Catholic recusant—or refusenik—there were three who attended the realm’s reformed churches, awaiting deliverance from heretical preaching in “the embrace of the ecclesiastical establishment.” Walsham calls them “church papists.”99 All that the authorities could do about the potential threat posed by these camouflaged Catholics in regions known to have been resistant to religious reform in the past was to alert troops to the danger. Levies in Lancashire could have been so told, because they kept close to home even when the Spanish armada was sighted. Deployment of the local Lancashire militia may have been meant as a disincentive, as a tactic to ensure that enemies within would not start acting out.100 Surveys identified likely landing sites, but locals were laggard in fortifying the coastline. England was unprepared for an invasion. There were only two permanent garrisons in the 1580s, at Dover and Berwick. Traditionally, the able-bodied were called to arms when distress dictated, but arrangements for their training and provision were barely adequate in 1588. Celebrating that spectacular year, poets forgot the citizen soldiers’ unpreparedness and planed the rough texture of the ordeals of recruits who thought “themselves thrise happy made” to exchange the creature comforts of their homes for the queen’s service.101 From this distance, it seems fair to speculate that the armed amateurs were happier still presuming that England’s superiority at sea improved the chances of their avoiding contact with the enemy. They and their queen counted on trained, energetic mariners, worthy vessels, and excellent ordinance. Spain and Philip counted on Parma, who secured the Scheldt estuary, an excellent staging area for the invasion of England. Fresh troops from Italy joined the Spanish veterans of the Dutch wars. The first challenge for the armada’s admiral was to bring his ships safely to the Scheldt. He was to play defense, passing through the Channel; the objective was not to engage the enemy but to get to Flanders and Parma. But weather ruined the {  30  } 

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armada’s chances. “The Protestant winds” gave the Spanish ships no option but to turn up the east coast of England and abandon the plan. English mariners harassed their enemy and snagged strays until munitions were exhausted: “Ours were but fisher-boats,” theirs “a monstrous fleet.” But God saved the queen.102 English officials seem to have been taken aback by the unwillingness of resident Catholics to rebel when the armada was sighted. Did deployments of armed loyal subjects discourage them? Were they waiting for Parma’s troops to land? Or did they “love popery well but [were] loath to lose by it,” as a reformist later summarized, and thus waited to see the balance tip before weighing in?103 One can also argue that the Jesuit missionaries were to blame. Catholic Christopher Bagshaw’s scorn for the “intermedl[ing]” of expatriates during the 1580s suggests as much. Bagshaw resented the Jesuit vanguard and referred to “seminarie men” as “thornes in [the] sides” of Catholic priests, who never left England. The Jesuits’ contempt for what had survived of the English Catholic ministry, “when they first came hither,” he went on, fed the order’s self-importance. The “attempt of 1588” was prominent on Bagshaw’s bill of complaints. He was certain that missionary “wretches” “were either procurors, perswaders, or agents” promoting Spain’s schemes, which, he thought, went some distance in discrediting Catholicism. Those “wretches,” he predicted, “shall be had in perpetuall detestation.”104 Yet the resident Catholics’ quiescence in 1588 only imperceptibly, if at all, caused their stock to appreciate. Religiously reformed officials were still unsure that the reformed status quo was secure. The very next year, as Shakespeare was settling in London, local constables scoured the city from Holborn to Hampstead looking for papists.105 The Calvinists who continued to count Catholics among their friends made certain when they visited them that they were long gone before their hosts made preparations to hear Mass. And the more ecumenically inclined among the religiously reformed, if we may take Edmund Spenser as representative, were concerned that intrepid “prestes . . . will undoo” their Catholic colleagues.106 Hunts for missionaries, or “seminarie men,” in the countryside persisted. Catholic recusants there were only allowed enough weaponry to defend their properties; R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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if a fifth column were to arise, authorities wanted to ensure it would be lightly armed.107 English Catholics abroad were undaunted, insisting that their families at home would welcome and amply assist the next invasion. Student orations at Valladolid, the new base on the Continent for the English mission in the 1580s, referred to King Philip as the perfect candidate to “take [God’s] quarrel in hand.” He alone was ready to “cut down and exterpate the proud and murthering mindes of the bloody Lutherans and Calvenists.”108 Leading resident recusants may have been anticipating as much. On occasion, constables stumbled across Catholics concealing thousands of pounds of gunpowder “against the day of the invasion.”109 Would Philip, Parma, and their fanatical English friends succeed in ridding the realm of its “innocent maiden queen, whose glorious life hath . . . dishonourably been sought and thirsted after, these many years”?110 Elizabeth’s counselors urged her to make the Spanish threat her foremost concern. Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, was one of the most insistent.111 He had been to war with Spain, having accompanied Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and his stepfather, to the Netherlands in 1585. Essex’s Apologie, written in 1603, describes England’s “great actions” abroad, celebrating the heroics of his comrades in arms, particularly those of Philip Sidney, who was killed in battle and promptly “canonized” as a Protestant martyr. Sidney left Essex his sword, and, years later, Essex married Sidney’s widow. In the interim, he tended to go off chasing an elusive, decisive engagement with Spain.112 Endlessly cash-strapped, he was drawn by Francis Drake to the Iberian coast. Dutch mariners joined the expedition, giving it the appearance of a Calvinist crusade against Philip, “the principal maytener of papal religion.”113 Essex’s critics claimed that desperation, specifically fears of bankruptcy, rather than selfless religious devotion led him to war. But his admirers did not pause to probe for motives; Anthony Wingfield, for one, marveled at the earl’s “exceeding forwardness,” by which Wingfield meant courage under fire or daring—not greed or impudence.114 But Essex was impudent and, on his return to England, imprudent. Shakespeare would have heard of it, for Essex was inclined to offend {  32  } 

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everyone who advocated improved relations with Spain. He was notorious in London during the early 1590s and the most controversial figure frequenting Elizabeth’s Court. He opposed William Cecil, by then Lord Burghley, the queen’s principal secretary, who suggested that the Spanish should be humored and used to keep French ambitions on the Continent in check. Elizabeth concurred with Cecil, yet Essex refused to relent. He wanted Spain robbed of its American treasures and wholly disabled. He appealed to panicky English preachers apprehensive about parishioners “falling away into poperie” once a second Spanish armada was sighted.115 Finally, his efforts and his partisans’ apprehensions won over Elizabeth and Cecil, who grew concerned that “overmuch toleration” of English Catholicism could, on Spain’s second coming, result in “the great defection of [her] subjects.”116 In 1596, Elizabeth and Cecil approved Essex’s plans for an expedition, a preemptive strike at what appeared to be Spanish preparations to invade England the following year. Lord Admiral Howard commanded the fleet; at Cadiz, Essex stormed ashore and took the city in an afternoon. Historian R. B. Wernham now describes the skirmish as “improvised” and “untidy,” although Howard was hyperbolic—“I do assure you,” he said, “there ys not a braver man in the worlde than the erle is.”117 But Essex was disappointed. He wanted to make Cadiz the English Calais in Spain, “to dwell in a port of the enemies,” to sink or capture their treasure ships at will, and to humiliate the enemy, adding the insult of an English presence to injuries that would keep Philip from funding another invasion of England or Ireland.118 But English troops wanted to go home, and Essex deferred to their wishes— obeying also a directive he received from queen and Council to return to the realm. The next summer, he was off again, yet with too few men to garrison a port. Hence, he remained at sea, tacking around the Azores and hoping to intercept Spain’s treasure fleet. The result, he hoped, would enable England “to make warr upon him with [Philip’s] owne money.”119 But when Essex found the galleons snug in harbor, their cargo safely ashore, he had no choice but to return to England to face his rivals in government carping at his failure, yet again, to do Spain “asmuche hurte as myght have [been] don.”120 And Essex was R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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criticized for conversing with radical reformists, the more stubborn of whom were suspended from their ministries for refusing to answer questions under oath or, as commonly, for refusing to swear oaths to reply truthfully to accusations, the origins of which were kept secret.121 Conformists defended their subpoenas. Liturgical nonconformity was reason enough, they said, to inquire further into reformists’ conscientious objections to the established church’s Prayer Book, to the pace and trajectories of the realm’s religious changes, and to the oath itself. Secrecy was appropriate, because there was no telling to what extremes overzealous reformists might go. “If zeal not be governed, it inclineth verye quicklie to vices,” so accusers ought to be shielded from reprisals. And who could argue that regimes had neither the right nor the duty to discover how its critics intended to “allure the people” and turn the multitude against the prevailing church government— against its courts, sanctions, and bishops?122 It looked as if conformists, with their accusations, inquiries, and oaths, were lining up England’s more stubborn dissidents so that bishops and their commissioners could run the table and clear the realm. Reformists, who had wanted to become their bishops’ consultants, to assist diocesans to “discerne” which of their judgments “be just and agreeable to God’s word,” could only have been disappointed by the unflinching enforcement of conformity that, they predicted, would discourage worthy candidates for the ministry and “disgrace” many conscientious clerics already in service.123 The oaths proved to be their undoing, and some seceded from the established church. A  number of their radically reformist colleagues, however, censured them for their secession. Eusebius Paget pointed out that the apostle Paul had not forsaken the Corinthian church because it had “blemishes.”124 Humphrey Fenn, preaching at Coventry, fairly close to Stratford, when not in prison, pledged to press for liturgical and polity reforms, only “so far as the laws and peace of the present estate of our church suffer it.”125 Thomas Cartwright “signed” that pledge and declared a truce of sorts with conformists, “notwithstanding we be of different judgment in some controversies of our church”; George Gifford, in Essex, declined to talk with radicals who refused to pray alongside him.126 {  34  } 

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Conformists do not seem to have been terribly impressed by reformists’ recoil from the radicals, for the separatists’ critics continued to criticize what they saw as the “misgovernment” of their dioceses. Some reformists, without diocesan executives’ authorization, convened local and regional conferences, over which mere ministers presided as if they were bishop-substitutes-in-waiting, waiting for current bishops to be removed—as one would remove “blemishes”— from the church.127 Furthermore, conformists’ suspicions about a significant subversive faction were no doubt corroborated by depositions of witnesses who had heard Thomas Cartwright and other reformists at St.  John’s College, Cambridge, in 1589 proclaim that they were wholly “against the superioritie and government of bishops.”128 Perhaps to answer charges that such sentiments about bishops exhibited ingratitude, the reformists offered rave reviews of the progress of religion in the realm. Rood lofts, they cheered, had been dismantled; wall paintings of saints were whitewashed; purgatory had been exposed as an eerie, dreadful hoax. England’s priests faced the laity from their communion tables and spoke English. For all that, reformists and conformists alike could take credit. But, during the final few decades of the sixteenth century, only the former celebrated a development that the conformists generally deplored. The culmination of decades of the reformists’ networking in large swatches of the realm was evident to all, as historian Peter Lake notes: the “levers of power” locally were now in the hands of pastors and laymen who favored an accelerated reform of the realm’s churches.129 Still, Whitgift and his favorite lieutenant, Richard Bancroft, had the queen’s ear, and she was pleased to hear the mantra of conformists satisfied with the shape of their church’s liturgy, the rubrics of its Prayer Book, and “superiority” in its ministry (episcopacy): pastors were “not called to rule this churche of England,” Whitgift explained, “but to obey.”130 He was persuaded that if the reformists’ views prevailed, England’s bishops would be no more than backup; parish consistories would select preachers, who needed only to repair to their bishops, as they might drop by registrars, to put their incumbencies in the public record. “Not called to rule . . . but to obey,” Whitgift said, yet reformists looked to “rule” the hearts and minds of their parishioners and, R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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Bancroft accused, to tug those “harts from the present governement of the church.” And from the government of the realm! One catches Bancroft wondering, in 1595, whether reformist agitators were experimenting with a discipline—a polity and “practice”—that could bring their realm to the brink of civil war: “I doo but aske the question.”131

K i n g Ja mes   I : R e l i g i on “W e l l Se tl e d ” When we left him earlier in this chapter, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was steering from the Azores back to England, still entertaining what historian Paul Hammer describes as “lofty ambitions” for international fame and influence.132 Essex expressed them along with his antipathy toward Spain with a self-assurance that increasingly put off his queen. She reprimanded him, after which he sulked and refused to attend Court. Essex argued that attendance was not part of “the indissoluble dutie which I owe to her Majestie.”133 Elizabeth would have been angrier still had word reached her that he blamed her indignation on others, specifically on his rival, Robert Cecil, Burghley’s son and later Lord Salisbury, who questioned Essex’s loyalty. To answer the charge, he volunteered to lead reinforcements to Ireland, and, monumentally miscalculating, he boasted that he would hastily humble Hugh O’Neill, the rebellious Earl of Tyrone and his queen’s nemesis there. The Council provided everything he imagined he would need: money, infantry, and transport. But, landing in Ireland, Essex realized his preparations had been inadequate. He had too few troops to hold Armagh while invading Ulster. To Elizabeth’s dismay, he promptly came to terms with Tyrone and returned to England to ward off criticism, which tallied his time in Ireland, the low yield from his Azores expedition, and even his tactics at Cadiz as failures. And complaints about his unruly soldiers who, while waiting for passage to England, “pestered both Dublyn and diverse marytime partes” probably beat him back to Court. Essex’s critics feasted on his humiliations.134 They were “bad instruments,” he said, vowing to “remove [them] from about her Majestie’s person.”135 To that end, he summoned {  36  } 

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friends to London and schemed to “surprise the Court with power.” He trusted that reformists in the city would rally to his cause, yet they appear to have been mystified by the ostensibly uncoordinated “rising” he staged in early February 1601, which failed abysmally. Essex was charged with having colluded all the while with Tyrone and was beheaded by the end of the month.136 The importance of all this for a politically and confessionally nonaligned playwright living in London at the time is hard to gauge. Literary historian James Shapiro persuasively argues that Shakespeare tremendously admired the Earl of Essex and smuggled him into his Henry V.137 Perhaps the playwright trusted Essex’s claim that he had acted against Cecil to defend himself and secure the succession for King James  VI of Scotland. The latter did not make the mistake of endorsing Essex’s initiative. Instead, he continued to cultivate his friendship with Cecil, Elizabeth’s—and soon James’s—chief counsel, who reassured the king that “when that day (soe grievous to us) shall happen which is the tribute of all mortall creatures, your shippe shalbe steered into the right harbour.”138 That “grievous” day did come two years later, in late March 1603. In early April, the king of Scotland started south. He reached Berwick on the sixth of that month and York on the sixteenth. Thomas Cecil, Robert’s older brother, choreographed the welcomes en route. By the middle of May, England’s new sovereign was at Whitehall. The Catholic community in his new realm did not know what to expect from James, who doubtlessly was well informed about the infra-confessional conflicts that had divided it for nearly ten years. Bishop Bancroft was credited with the “greatest blow that the papists received in all Queen Elizabeth’s tyme,” because he often stoked animosities that resulted in an uninterrupted war of words among church papists, resident priests, Jesuits, and “appellant” Catholic clergy.139 Jesuits were determined to out priests who, they said, disgraced their calling. Resident priests rallied around the accused and berated their accusers for arrogance and corruption. Reconciliation seemed unlikely after Jesuit William Weston refused to associate with priests imprisoned with him at Wisbech in 1595 and appealed to Rome to appoint an archpriest for England to investigate clerical misconduct. George Blackwell, who R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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had ties to the Jesuits, was sent and instructed to refashion English Catholicism in the order’s image.140 That was Thomas Bluet’s take on Rome’s and Blackwell’s purpose. Bluet, who had denounced Weston at Wisbech, lamented that the papacy entertained the illusion that English Catholics would be better off lined up behind “puritane Jesuits,” who were “right Donatists in resemblance” and who camouflaged their lust for control with their pleas for reform.141 John Colleton, another critic of the Jesuits, remembered that resident priests “welcomed [expatriate Jesuits] first entering into our labors . . . with all honor” and “acquainted them with our friends and places,” only to have the missionaries (“wolves”) impeach the “tender affections” of their clerical benefactors and turn the laity against them.142 But the bitterness of Colleton, Bluet, and other “discontented brethren” did not weigh heavily on Robert Persons, the leader of the Jesuits’ mission in the early 1580s, who, back in Rome, endorsed Weston’s request for the appointment of an archpriest and touted the nominee’s integrity. Persons protested that the order’s Catholic critics were “few in number” and “grene in credit.” Their accusations left only “little scratches,” hardly worth pondering. What disturbed Persons was that those “few,” “grene,” “discontented” critics had associated themselves with Richard Bancroft, who expected to reap rewards for the religiously reformed from demoralizing divisions within the English Catholic community.143 At issue were the Catholics’ chances of winning concessions from the new king. Rome first tried extortion, directing “all Catholikes in England” to withhold obedience from him until he resolved to bring his new realm back to the universal church.144 Appellants were least likely to oblige the pope. For a generation or more, they had made a point of “not exasperating [their Calvinist] adversaries.”145 We would be correct to think of appellants as accommodationists; they agreed with recusants that their realm’s reformed religion was badly deformed, and they trusted that time would tell against it, but appellants inferred from the history of the Christian traditions that Catholics could count on God to reconcile hostile governments to their faith’s survival and spread. Appellant accommodationists, searching history for examples of patience, thought that they found in Bishop {  38  } 

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Hilary of Poitiers an exceptional model and a theologian who, as far as they knew, persistently yet politely explained Nicene Christology to Emperor Constantius in the fourth century. Had there been Jesuits then, appellants intimated, Hilary would have been condemned for his failure to “exasperate” the authorities.146 For their part, the Jesuits looked for different ways to appease authorities in England. They, too, appealed to history, arguing that— unlike the phantom, invisible church religiously reformed rivals advocated—the very visible Catholic churches had stabilized the authority of their government partners throughout the history of the Christian traditions. And had not the Catholic hierarchy, by its existence and its insistence on obedience, compellingly conveyed to lay subjects the “inmerit of transgressing,” whereas the fideism of reformed religion, undervaluing merit, had invited insolence? King James, therefore, would serve himself and his subjects well by allowing his new realm’s Catholics the right to practice their religion “if not [with] approbation . . . without molestation.” In turn, the Catholic clergy would reintroduce the concept of merit—specifically, the merit and virtue of political obedience—into theology. Elizabeth, the Catholic plaintiffs complained, tried “to wear us out” with edicts, fines, and forfeitures, but “the truth [was] as cleare as the sunne on our side.” James, they said, should let that sun shine to rebuild or “reedify what the misinformed anger of a woman destroyed.”147 But James was suspicious of the Catholics’ ambitions to “reedify” the realm and of their warbling about “truth as cleare as the sunne.” Without conceding that they had gotten a raw deal from his predecessor, he nonetheless intimated that there might be relief in store, though he also confided to Cecil his worries that his early overtures to the recusants could have prompted their “bragging that none shall enter to be king thaire but by thaire permission.”148 Cecil answered by explaining the “dyfference[s]” in English Catholics’ “spirits”: few were bold; most were various shades of conciliatory; all were hopeful. The new king’s criticism of the old regime was readily accepted—notably, the observation that Cecil’s father, Lord Burghley, the queen, and her Council had been long on laws yet short on what James called “exemplaire execution” or enforcement. But Cecil recommended “charitable R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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relief,” which, he clarified, did not mean that Catholics—“enemies to the gospel”—would be encouraged to revive the old faith’s hold on the realm, but that sufficient measures should be put in place to make them “friends to [King James’s] good fortune.”149 Cecil was anxious that “charitable relief” not be misconstrued by England’s Calvinists. Hence, he probably saw to the circulation of the new king’s categorical declaration that, if forty thousand armed Catholics gave him a choice between pikes and peace, he “would rather dye in the field than condiscend to be false to God.”150 James, however, was less melodramatic when, in 1604, he addressed his first English Parliament and acknowledged that there were a number of “quiet, well-minded men” among Catholic “layickes.” Yet he estimated that many of their coreligionists, who were “nursed or brought up . . . upon such venim in place of wholesome nutriment,” became “factious stirrers of sedition and perturbers of the commonwealth.” The king regretted punishing “well-minded men” for confessional attachments, he said, but he believed he was forced to do so in self-defense. Catholic Masses and “murthers” of religiously reformed princes on the Continent seemed to him to be closely connected; “stirrers” and “perturbers” in France and Holland used the sacraments to consolidate fellow Catholics’ support for the “dethroning” of their sovereigns. James agreed to meet Catholic petitioners in his new realm partway, “so that all novelties might be renounced on either side”— that is, by  Calvinists and Catholics—but he left unspecified what he would weigh as novel and expendable. He did specify and stress how he deplored irrepressibly regicidal Catholics on the Continent. In England, their coreligionists must not, he said, take his gentle disposition as a sign that he was weak, for he welcomed opportunities to “tread downe their errors.”151 One could characterize James’s and Cecil’s as mixed messages. There was not much in them to console the Catholic accommodationists. True, their new king’s queen had been received into their church, and Cecil was still counseling “charitable relief.” Might there have been a vein of live-and-let-live beneath King James’s gruff talk of “tread[ing] downe errors”? Maybe so, but what surely would have complicated any translation of the new regime’s irenic inclinations {  40  } 

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into policy was the response anticipated and occasionally heard from the religiously reformed. Tobie Matthew, bishop of Durham, warned that Cecil’s and James’s efforts to appease or “quiet” the Catholic accommodationists had caused “great jollity” among Catholics of all stripes, because the relaxation of restrictions on the practice of the traditional faith was almost certain to lead to the growth of the unreformed community “in number, courage, and influence.” The growth and “jollity,” Matthew continued, were doubly difficult to overlook at a time when the king and his Council were silencing the realm’s more forward reformists. Confiding that he “mislike[d] their zeal,” Matthew also acknowledged that he was dismayed to see their hopes for a more effective preaching ministry—hopes he shared—shattered while English Catholics’ hopes for tolerance or more seemed to be encouraged. Had the realm’s authorities forgotten that Catholicism had been (and still was) “opposite and contrary” to the religion established in King James’s old and new territories?152 Matthew either misperceived or—more likely—exaggerated the new government’s kindness to Catholics. His remarks about their resurgence and rejoicing were almost certainly intended to nudge his new king to stay Elizabeth’s course. Moreover, Matthew overstated the king’s determination to disadvantage reformists. England’s first Stuart sovereign was never as opposed as its second—his son and heir, Charles—to reformist critics of the Prayer Book and of its conformist partisans. But James seems to have sensed that a few reformists, unable to “avoyd all singularity” and bitter toward bishops, would set off one schism after another. Hence, the new king supported the interrogations and deprivations Whitgift originated and the old queen allowed twenty years earlier.153 Petitions asking that the Council halt the proceedings and reinstate those reformist ministers Elizabeth’s commissioners had deprived were not answered favorably. Prominent London preacher Stephen Egerton proposed new procedures, suggesting that bishops and their deputies be excluded from the commissions sifting the accusations against nonconformists and that panels of laymen determine whether pastors exceeded their authority and “used new forms” instead of simply, selectively, and inoffensively omitting what they considered Catholic and objectionable.154 R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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Too much in the new king’s new realm seemed unresolved when he summoned several conformists and reformists to a conference at Hampton Court in autumn 1604. From all reports, what could have become an occasion for polemical pyrotechnics was rather subdued. Reformists gained no ground. James was unsympathetic when they aired requests for relief from what they called episcopal tyranny. The king was wary of proposed alternatives to diocesan administration. He feared that congregational consistories and assertive local leadership would end with the kind of decentralization that could destabilize England’s secular—as well as religious—regimes. “They pleade for [appeal to] my supremacie,” he said, referring to reformists’ deference, but, he added, “I know what would become of my supremacie” once bishops “were out” and reformist agitators “in place.”155 We have no idea what Shakespeare knew about, or whether he cared about, the Hampton Court conference, yet he and James’s new theater company, the King’s Men, had been at the site before the delegates were invited. And the company returned more often than did the reformists. The results of the king’s meeting, of course, were no secret. Reports circulated in manuscript as well as in print. James was known to have confirmed royal support for highly placed prelates, whom reformists derisively called “ruling bishops,” and to have rejected reformists’ argument that the Bible, “the all sufficient word of God,” made no provision for executives “ruling” churches.156 Yet he conceded that the bearing and behavior of many English bishops were as off-putting and papist as their critics had claimed. His sensible Scots subjects, he said, would turn thuggish at the sight of English executives’ sumptuous stoles and pretentious processions. “If I were not with you,” strolling through Edinburgh, he told his new realm’s prelates, “you should be stoned to death.”157 With their king’s imprimatur, however, they continued to hound nonconformists. In Royston, parishioners complained about the dismissals of the “faithfull pastors, through whose ministry we have bin . . . brought from darkenes into light.”158 Yet James trusted that the religiously reformed community, as a whole, enjoyed greater security and tranquility as a result of bishops’ vigilance. Praestat ut pereat unus quam unitas—better to send one intractable preacher packing than to {  42  } 

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jeopardize church unity. Church unity depended on conformity. Nonconformity could disturb the peace of parishes, dioceses, and entire regions of the realm for generations. So, James concluded, his bishops were simply doing their duty to church and crown when they and their deputies probed to find out whether the “affections” of subordinates tended to be “quiet or turbulent.” And concluding at Hampton Court that reformists’ proposals for change were both “turbulent” and “frivolous,” the king declared that he found the religion in his new realm “well setled” and suggested that he meant to keep it that way.159 Cecil and King James disappointed and often distressed the “forward” (or “frivolous”) reformists, several of whom pinned their hopes on Prince Henry. They speculated that, if only the king called off his bishops’ campaigns against conscientious nonconformists, the centenary of the reformation in the 1630s—during the reign of his son—would see the completion of work that the Tudors had started. The eighth Henry “pull’d down abbeys and cells”; the ninth would see to it that England knew no more of “bishops and bells.”160 The ninth’s father, James, hardly would have approved the rhymester’s abbreviation of his tenure, but he listened less and less to reformists’ appeals, favored conformist preachers—notably, Lancelot Andrewes—and kept his distance from what historian Kenneth Fincham describes as “the excessive evangelicalism” around the realm.161 As for some English Catholics’ fin de siècle hopes for relief from a new regime, they were dashed in 1604, when James made his debut in Parliament and pronounced himself well-pleased with England’s well-settled, reformed religion. A few devotees of the old faith were so disconcerted that they conspired to blow up Parliament with king and prince in its chambers. Robert Catesby, the ringleader, expected to gallop to Wales with a posse of accomplices after the fateful explosion, anticipating that armed coreligionists would join them to await in Wales the arrival of the reinforcements Guy Fawkes had been recruiting during his travels abroad. The conspirators, with their new English army and their foreign friends formed, in Catesby’s imagination, a juggernaut. They would kidnap and crown James’s daughter; England would return to Rome.162 Wilder coups have been known to succeed, but, in this instance, there was a leak, and Fawkes was discovered with incriminating kegs R e l i g i o n A r o u n d   { 

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of powder before Parliament convened in early November 1605. Other conspirators were apprehended in the Midlands; Catesby was cornered and killed. Historians have tried ever since to chase down facts over the many furlongs of fiction that hyperactive imaginations have associated with the “powder plot.” Were Catesby and Fawkes deranged? Did expatriate missionaries and resident priests endorse the plan? Could Robert Cecil have masterminded the conspiracy or merely let it run to discredit Catholicism and rally support for the new regime? Were other authorities correct to think that a few ruthless fanatics under the sway of sinister Jesuits had taken England to the very brink of disaster?163 The government might have blamed Spain—yet again—had English envoys, months before, not come to provisional terms that promised a period of peace between the two old enemies. Something approaching Spain-fatigue apparently had set in, and seasoned veteran Richard Leveson—who fought against the armada in 1588, during the Cadiz expedition, in the Azores, and against the Spanish troops in Ireland— was dissuaded from undertaking yet another expedition.164 With the new king reconsidering England’s old animosities, it was a terrible time to recycle anti-Hapsburg rhetoric, so the Jesuits were left to take the blame. Conspirators refused to implicate them, although Henry Garnet, the Jesuit superior in England, acknowledged that one of the would-be assassins mentioned the plot during confession. Garnet’s defense did not impress interrogators, who were unpersuaded that confidences of the confessional were inviolable. It was wrong (and papist), they claimed, to rank the secrets of the confessional above the safety of one’s religiously reformed country.165 Garnet insisted that he had disapproved of the plot and had begged overeager conspirators to leave the reconversion of the realm to Providence. He failed; then they failed. Finally, he failed again, in another forum, to persuade English magistrates that he and fellow Jesuits had nothing to do with the homicidal intent of Catesby, Fawkes, and their friends. Garnet was executed, and English Catholics waited anxiously for the measures they were certain that reformed officials would devise to “roote out all memory of Catholike religion by sudden banishment, massacre, imprisonment, or some unsupportable vexations and pressures.”166

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The old faith’s leading spokesmen were far from idle. Archpriest George Blackwell was quick to condemn, publicly and stridently, those egregiously irresponsible fringe figures whom he blamed for having concocted “a detestable and damnable practice,” “odious,” he added, “in the sight of God.”167 Blackwell and other accommodationists may have been consoled to hear it denounced by Justice Coke as “the Jesuits’ treason,” yet no Catholic would have drawn comfort from the comments of another magistrate who belligerently referred to the plot as “an anatomye of poperie.”168 Cecil let out that the new king was not contemplating “new severities.” He admitted, however, that “this fiery treason” “inflamed” the realm’s religiously reformed and confessionally indifferent subjects alike against “the generalitie of the papists”—so much so, he speculated, that “the greatest violences . . . under colour of publicke safetie” would be construed as “effects of care and providence.” But Cecil was certain that James would safeguard “publicke safetie” gently, reserving the rod for “the particulars”—convicted conspirators—and showing mercy to Catholic subjects who deplored and denounced the crime of those “particulars.” The Roman church could make that benevolence easier for all to accept, not just during the crisis at hand but as permanent policy, Cecil said, if popes stopped encouraging assassins and endorsing “grosse usurpation[s]”: officials everywhere, who “doe not approve papal jurisdiction yet would faine . . . a charitable opinion of their [Catholic] subjects,” would not risk the dangerous disapproval of others if the papacy restrained Jesuits. The officials to whom Cecil referred undoubtedly included his king.169 The powder plot proved to the religiously reformed that their religion was celestially sanctioned as well as “well setled.” God had delivered the church in 1534 in Parliament, where the realm’s first reformers “shooke off the bonds and fetters of the Romane corruption.” If the conspirators had brought the edifice down on the heads of the dignitaries within, one could infer God’s displeasure. But, with Westminster spared, England’s reformed religion well settled, and the king’s regime and family prospering, Cecil said, one should presume exactly the opposite.170

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On the next few anniversaries of the powder plot’s discovery, sermons reinforced what Cecil would have had them presume—and, if the archdeacon of Canterbury was right, they also “rowse[d] up the drowsie spirits of the people,” “premonish[ing]” them to oppose extremists.171 Did Shakespeare hear the “rows[ing]” pulpit oratory? Did he take notice of the printed sermons? Maybe not, but knowing something about the religion around the realm, we are now in a better place to inquire about the religion around Shakespeare.

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2 around shakespeare

Ea rly Identifying some of the religions around the realm—the last chapter’s task—was not at all as challenging as deciding which features of each likely surfaced in the conversations of ordinary yet alert subjects. Retrieving the religion around Shakespeare—this chapter’s assignment—would be easier if it were not so difficult to locate him, particularly in the years after he finished formal schooling and, later, as he moved about London and Southwark. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in 1564, educated there in the 1570s, and married nearby. Of that we can be sure. He was in London or outside the city walls in Shoreditch by the late 1580s, occasionally returning to Stratford to visit his family and then to retire a few years before his death in 1616. But, in London, he gets lost—lost to us, that is. We cannot tell where he first lodged. Plausibly, Shoreditch, because the theaters were there, and many players lived where they worked. But glovers, his father’s London colleagues, congregated in Bishopsgate Ward, so he might have joined them upon coming to the

city—or later. We know only that he changed residences from Bishopsgate to Bankside by 1599 and that he moved back across the Thames to Cripplegate ward on Silver Street soon after.1 Beyond the above, we are left with questions. What routes did he take to the theater districts? How often did he pass St. Paul’s Cathedral? Did he pause to hear parts of the outdoor sermons at Paul’s Cross or to see what the booksellers in the churchyard stocked? He eventually purchased the gatehouse at Blackfriars, yet there is no evidence that he ever lived there. Did he spend leisure time among playgoers in Holborn or with barristers at the Inns of Court? Where did he drink? Where, if at all, did he pray? We shall find Shakespeare—and religion—in London in due course. First, to Stratford! Shakespeare’s parents were two of the twelve hundred or so souls in Stratford during the second half of the sixteenth century. His father, John, was elected constable six years before his birth and, four years later, served a single term as the town’s high bailiff or mayor. By then, the senior Shakespeare was a prosperous glover, but he traded in more than just leather goods. John profited particularly from real estate transactions.2 He and his wife, Mary (Arden), may have been fond of the old faith, although, if so, they were discreet, for Catholicism in Warwickshire during the 1560s and 1570s diminished one’s chances for solvency and political influence. Religiously reformed notables Thomas Lucy and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, maintained homes nearby and were vigilant, as was Edwin Sandys, a reformist, when he was bishop of Worcester. John Whitgift, in the same see somewhat later, was equally watchful. All four were intolerant of Catholics. The religiously reformed, vigilant, and intolerant had ample opportunities to watch John Shakespeare. For his part, as constable, coroner, alderman, and bailiff at various times, he could hardly afford to be dismissive of the established church’s commissions. On his watch, the images of Saints Helena, George, and Thomas à Becket on the interior walls of Stratford’s parish church were painted over. Perhaps he was following orders, opting to appease and please his religiously reformed and influential neighbors while secretly sharing the faith of other locals who sent their sons abroad to study for the Catholic priesthood. Perhaps he winked or looked the other way as local {  48  } 

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Catholics opened their homes to—and hid—priests returning from the Continent to keep alive enthusiasms for the old faith.3 We can only guess, but we know that the Shakespeares’ home on Henley Street had nothing comparable to the passages and compartments installed elsewhere to keep fugitive priests from pursuers. Nonetheless, the Shakespeare residence could very well have concealed a critical document for two centuries, a will with John’s signature that reportedly was discovered by a repairman working between the rafters in the eighteenth century. Expatriate Jesuit missionaries, crossing from the Continent in the late 1570s and thereafter, were known to distribute unsigned copies of the text that told the testators’ families and friends to pray for the souls of their dear departed and that suggested the effectiveness of such prayers in getting the deceased through purgatory more speedily.4 Unfortunately, the signed will was lost after it was copied; hence, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the original and of the signature.5 But, even if we could, we would still not be sure that William knew of the will. Literary historian Richard Wilson steers around uncertainties of that sort, accepting the existence of the will and presuming that the senior Shakespeare was a covert Catholic—covert to a point, for Wilson also imagines that the younger Shakespeare could not have missed “the fervor with which [his] father put his name to [the] text.”6 But one could concede the document’s discovery as well as the authenticity of John Shakespeare’s signature without the supposed “fervor,” conjuring up a different scene in the house on Henley Street. For John could well have been hedging his bets; he might have been compensating for those compromises that preserved his political position, fixing his signature without the enthusiasm that Wilson imagined and without his son’s knowing. Or perhaps John Shakespeare’s conscience caught up with him. Many Catholics, known now as church papists, feigned conformity to preserve their properties and positions in society but were not at all anxious about their dissembling. According to their critics, the dissemblers cradled “a conscience so large [they] could never wander from it,” which means that, unperturbed, they prayed with their religiously reformed neighbors.7 But William’s father might not have been among the camouflaged yet relatively A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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carefree church papists. Alas, John’s conscience is not available for inspection, but there is evidence that he avoided the services of the established church. In 1592, by which time his son was living in London, the senior Shakespeare was reprimanded for “absenting [himself from public worship] for feare of processe.”8 If we take seriously the reason given for his truancy—“feare of processe”—we must rule out or, at the very least, scale down the importance of John’s scruples or conscience. He was accused of staying away to avoid his creditors. The explanation is quite plausible, inasmuch as persons expecting payment of outstanding bills were known to corner their prey at churches; the statute requiring presence at worship conveniently brought delinquent, elusive debtors to a particular place at an appointed time. “Feare of processe,” furthermore, suggests financial difficulties, and we possess independent evidence of just that. Selling what was called “fell wool,” the wool plucked from the skins acquired for the manufacture of gloves, glovers occasionally dabbled in speculation. Other Midlands merchants and consumers blamed the glovers for hoarding what herders sold them and for problems on the supply side and the rising prices that resulted. Yet, when demand dried up and prices declined after glovers extended their credit to increase their stocks, their position in the market became unenviable. We know that John Shakespeare purchased his last property in 1575. Thereafter he was regarded as a man of limited means; his colleagues on the town council agreed to reduce his fees and forgive a fine assessed against him for failing to participate in their deliberations. He subsequently resigned. Is it unreasonable to assume that, seeing no financial or political advantages in feigning reformed religious sentiment, John Shakespeare decided to stay away from church to dodge his creditors and the consequences of having become what Robert Bearman calls “a business failure”?9 Assumptions must substitute for reliable intelligence about piety and poverty in William Shakespeare’s home, and the same applies when we try to learn about the religion around him at school. His two schoolmasters’ schoolmasters were Catholics, although Simon Hunt and Thomas Jenkins would have been reckless—teaching in {  50  } 

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Warwickshire during the 1570s—to tilt curricula or catechesis toward Rome. John Cottom, who succeeded Jenkins, was the brother of a priest, later martyred, but we cannot tell whether Cottom mixed faith of any sort with lessons. Yet, if he had, it would be of little consequence for our studies, because William Shakespeare left school just as Cottom came to Stratford. As for the student’s seriousness, William’s career and learning surely suggest it, but his plays sniped at schoolmasters—at Pinch, his charlatan in The Comedy of Errors, and at the pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labors Lost. Might the mockery onstage indicate that the bard had been bored by his formal studies and contemptuous of those who presided over them?10 When we turn from home and school to the parish church with its two chapels, we again find that scraps of information about the religion around Shakespeare hardly make a meal. Two or three ministers simultaneously served parishioners. The curate at one chapel, St. Peter’s in Bishopston, stocked his large library with works by the reformists’ paladin, Dudley Fenner, but also with a few treatises by Catholic martyr Thomas More.11 That curate was unquestionably a bibliophile, but nothing betrays his religious preference. His sometimes colleague at the parish’s other chapel, All Souls’ in Luddington, is more forthcoming, as it were; he was suspended from the ministry for nonconformity by Bishop Whitgift, who was already on record as an enemy of those taking liberties with prescribed forms of worship. Ten years earlier, Whitgift anticipated that “great contentions and brawlings” were sure to follow if “every man, as he listeth[,] alter and change” the prevailing religious settlement.12 But the chaplain’s suspension was lifted in 1584, presumably after his compliance. Still, we do possess substantial evidence for the reformist cast of the Stratford ministry. In 1586, puritans delivered to Parliament a survey of parish clergy. Surveyors enthusiastically commended Richard Barton, vicar of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, the town’s parish church, as a remarkably “learned, zealous, and godlie” man. “What a happy age if our church were fraight of manie such,” they concluded, thrusting Barton forward as an exception to the misrule that, they complained, would very soon have grave consequences for the quality of ministry in all of England’s dioceses.13 But we cannot tell A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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whether Barton had any meaningful contact with the Shakespeares. And William’s whereabouts when the survey was taken are unknown. He might never have heard the “godlie” vicar preach. Barton’s predecessor, John Bretchgirdle, had baptized the bard-to-be, according to parish records, but, for all we know, baptism could well have been the last as well as the first time he was touched by a pastor until his wedding. So, conceivably, William Shakespeare’s most memorable encounters at the parish church, into late adolescence, were not conversations with clergy but confrontations with hired hands at Holy Trinity, who were commissioned, as were others in nearby Warwick, to clear the churchyard of bothersome boys.14 William was married to Anne Hathaway in church, of course, at Temple Grafton. His father-in-law, Richard, later named a Catholic as executor of his estate, but that hardly signals that Hathaway was fervently or even casually an advocate for the old faith. A month before his daughter’s wedding in 1582, Richard voted, as a juror, to secure the interests of a religiously reformed litigant in a property dispute to deny the claims made by a local Catholic.15 Had the local records been better preserved, we would know more about the Hathaways—and, for that matter, about the Shakespeares—but too much has gone missing. The loss of the minutes for the proceedings of the vicar’s court at Holy Trinity during Barton’s tenure is particularly regrettable, for the docket no doubt was full. Although many tithe cases reached diocesan courts, where officials, calculating what was due, on occasion quite literally counted sheep, a number of controversies related to probate, defamation, and general discipline were sifted in Stratford, two of every three years.16 Local officials had other obligations. They were required by the bishops of Worcester to track and sometimes to track down expatriate Catholic missionaries who, having returned to the realm, were passing through Worcestershire and Warwickshire on their way north. Moreover, local officials were also to see to it that anyone who offered hospitality to those sojourners was fined. Such fines, along with forfeitures for failing to attend church, sometimes seemed to have the desired effect. After two-thirds of his estates had been sequestered, Catholic Thomas Blunt, for one, joined the ranks of the religiously {  52  } 

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reformed.17 Successes of that sort cut the number of Catholic gentry who were eager to harbor the itinerant “massing priests.” Still, the priests on the road (and on the run) distributed spiritual consolations for their hosts’ and their friends’ material losses—specifically, papal indulgences for anyone risking destitution to save the realm from “the wicked ways of . . . heresy.”18 The risk, however, was seldom as great as those who devised the disincentives hoped. Fines frequently were forgiven soon after they were levied. As a result, doors around Stratford still opened to receive the missionaries, and tales of their courage and of their harrowing escapes stirred sympathy in select circles, where Jesuit Henry Garnet’s daring flight “in the dead time of the night” was almost certainly taken as a token of God’s favor as often as it was retold.19 Religious reformers also valued inspiring stories that featured God’s favor. They relied on sermons to stir sympathy and spread the good news that Christians were saved by faith and repentance rather than by pilgrimages and penances. The reformers’ problem was delivery. Too few were qualified to preach, and many who were qualified were denied licenses because they objected to the prescribed liturgy of the established church. Reformists took stock in 1586 and found clerical leadership sadly lacking in the realm. Barton, as we learned, was exceptional—but an exception. He got high marks for his ministry in Stratford’s parish church, yet survey results generally disheartened the puritan surveyors. Innuendo and insult signaled their discontent, but a few delinquents were outed explicitly and abusively—although perhaps none as vituperatively as Jeffrie Jones of Corlie, north of Coventry and not far from Stratford, who was dubbed a “dumbe” (unpreaching) pastor and a “drunkard, gamster, quareller, swearer, pilferer, [and] adulterer.” To be sure, most incumbents seem to have practiced their professions in that gray area between the ghastly and “godlie,” where parishioners likely placed Thomas Crocket, who served the church in Preston Baggot—five miles from the Shakespeares on Henley Street. Crocket “seemeth to be zealous,” the survey noted, but he had something of a drinking problem. In the last analysis, however, the reformists cared less about what came into their colleagues’ mouths than what issued from them, less about diet or decorum than about the quantity A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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and quality of sermons. Hence, what most disturbed them was that only forty-one of the one hundred and eighty-six clergy listed for the diocese of Worcester were licensed to preach.20 The survey and the complaints that preceded and attended its release annoyed conformist bishops and their allies in Parliament. Before he was named to the see of Worcester, Whitgift called the complainants “contentious captains” of the puritan party.21 On leaving Worcester for the see of Canterbury, he accused them of picking fights about insignificant practices and rubrics simply to secure power for themselves and for partisans in the parishes.22 And the very reformist whom he thought to be captain of those querulous “captains,” Thomas Cartwright, his nemesis at Cambridge in 1570, arrived in the diocese of Worcester soon after Whitgift left. Cartwright twice found his way to Stratford yet settled in Warwick, ten miles north, where Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, appointed him chaplain at the hospital.23 By then, Leicester was the puritans’ most reliable patron in the Midlands; his candidates for profitable leases or for livings ordinarily got them. He interfered in Peterborough to protect a dissident preacher, successfully countering the diocesan notoriously disinclined to “cherish” or “encourage” criticism.24 Leicester had leverage locally because he was influential at Court, where his powerful friends—notably William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s indefatigable envoy and formidable “spymaster”—were quick to defend him when Catholic critics predicted that ambition would “prick him forward” and that he would rally the realm’s puritans, undermine its episcopacy, overturn Elizabeth, and make himself king.25 But one could make a case that neither Leicester nor Cartwright was responsible for the textures of puritan dissent around Shakespeare. Former Marian exile Anthony Gilby settled not far from Stratford and, from the 1560s, criticized the prescribed, purportedly reformed liturgies. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntington, placed Gilby in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, northeast of Warwick, and Gilby drew his friends to the area to preach. Their prophesying at Southam and energetic ministries seem to have been successful. Southam was one of several parishes that answered omnia bene when diocesan commissions circulated inquiries about defections to Catholicism.26 {  54  } 

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Should we then credit Gilby, who, having declined an episcopal appointment on his return from exile, informally assumed leadership of the reformists in Warwickshire and Leicestershire and was “widely regarded as byshopp”?27 But to conformists, Gilby’s treatises and sermons posed a threat. They compared his network in the Midlands to the supposedly seditious circle of reformists organized by his London friends Thomas Wilcox and John Field. Conformists argued that both sets of malcontents undermined the regime’s and realm’s stability— which was precisely the line later taken up, to great effect, by Richard Bancroft.28 Gilby had answers as early as 1581, identifying the conformists’ attack with “the old crafte of Satan [who] charge[s] God’s servaunts as factious and seditious.”29 Still, the charges stuck. Gilby died before his caustic replies earned him time in prison, yet his clerical friends in the Midlands—notably, Humphrey Fenn of Coventry and Daniel Wyght of Stretton as well as Cartwright of Warwick—were apprehended and jailed for “denying her Majesty’s lawful authority” to govern churches as she and her conformist bishops saw fit. The three confined reformists thought of themselves as “prisoners in poperie,” referring to their jailers—John Whitgift of Canterbury and Bishop Aylmer of London—as papal tyrants.30 We will likely never know what Shakespeare thought of the charges and counter-charges, although our third chapter finds that several of his plays were hard on the church’s hierarchy, but we do know that friends of the imprisoned Midlands ministers spoke up. Job Throckmorton, who was elected to represent Warwick in the Parliament of 1586, complained about “tiranicall dealing against the Lord’s faithful ministers.” Not long before registering his complaint, he accompanied Cartwright to Stratford. The two may have been canvassing the reformed churches there for the puritans’ survey of the ministry. Possibly, on that occasion, Throckmorton uttered an insult that was later printed—namely, that Whitgift, who by then would have had nearly three years to reenergize the ministry as the archbishop of Canterbury, was “not worthy to carry Cartwright’s books.”31 Conformists were quick to come to Whitgift’s defense and also drew Throckmorton’s fire. He blamed their “envenomed mouthes” for the “kitchen rhetorike” and for “speeches so opprobrious” that A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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they forced his friends, well-meaning reformists, to defend their reputations and petition their way out of prison.32 Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter Cathedral, concluded confidently that the Midlands’ commoners were too astute to be gulled by Throckmorton’s attacks on conformists and by his puritanical insistence that the realm’s bishops be “unspotted.”33 But we cannot calculate from this distance whether the scalding criticisms of Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright were influential, or of only passing interest, in Stratford. Maybe much the same should be said about the Earl of Leicester’s patronage of puritans. Of course, all of this was part of the religion around Shakespeare, although when Leicester dropped into conversations around Henley Street, talk may simply have turned to the renovations to his castle at nearby Kenilworth. His reformist sympathies may have been of no interest to the local workmen who gossiped about the project. William Shakespeare, in any event, may not have been at hand to hear them. A few literary historians believe he left for Lancashire soon after leaving school in Stratford. And if he did go north, the religion around him was more recusant—resistant to reform—than reformed. Parts of Lancashire were doggedly Catholic from 1536, when participants in what was called the Pilgrimage of Grace demanded that King Henry VIII recatholicize the region as well as others, to the last decade of the century, when, rumor had it, the northwest would welcome an invasion from Spain or Scotland to initiate “the alteration of [reformed] religion.”34 High sheriff Richard Holland, reporting to the queen’s Council at the time Shakespeare may have been north, confirmed that “either none at all or verie small reformation [was] had” there.35 Conspiracies to rescue Mary Stuart almost invariably featured that region of the realm. Lancashire was thought to be the best place to take the Queen of Scots for safekeeping.36 Stratford schoolmaster John Cottom hailed from there. His neighbor Alexander Hoghton hired a man named William Shakeshafte, who appears to have had some interest in theater. To this day, the locals say that Hoghton’s Shakeshafte was William Shakespeare of Stratford. Some historians agree, conjecturing that Cottom introduced Hoghton to Shakespeare and that the latter’s presence, years later, among the playmakers associated with Lancashire’s Lord Ferdinando Stanley {  56  } 

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can be explained by the soon-to-be playwright’s residence in the north and connections with Catholics there.37 Evidence for Shakespeare’s lodging in Lancashire for a time is very suggestive but far from conclusive. Yet what seems all but incontestable is that Hoghton and his neighbors were fond of the old faith and were beneficiaries of the local magistrates’ “gentle dealinge” with the region’s Catholics. Reformist Edward Fleetwood of Wigan despaired that the statutes against the likes of Hoghton were unenforced, explaining—by complaining—that there were too few “sounde gentlemen” around to staff the commissions, which were instructed to supply the queen’s Council with “sufficient intelligence” about “inconvenient persons” in the region.38 From articles of inquiry that survive, we know that both politics and religion were in play, although results, as Fleetwood noted, were hardly impressive. Commissioners required that persons suspected of being “inconvenient[ly] Catholic” relay what they knew about—and confide their reactions to—the papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570. Had they heard that she had been “denounced” in Rome as “no  rightull governour of England”? Were they appalled that Pope Pius V had absolved “subjects of this realm from all obedience to hyr”? Did Lancashire gentry think that Jesuits and other expatriate priests were “lawfully executed” for having tried to rally resident Catholics and to stir rebellion? Were Lancashire Catholics genuinely opposed to Rome’s overreaching?39 Perhaps, as Fleetwood groused, the interrogations were “gentle” in the north, but they did produce at least one notable defection: Lord Stanley apologized for the “backwardnes” of his father’s faith, promising the bishop of Chester that Lancashire Protestants would soon see that no one would “shewe himself more forward” in their cause than he, when he succeeded his “backward” father as earl of Derby.40 Many interpreters who think Shakespeare lived (as Shakeshafte) among Lancastrian Catholics appreciate, as does John Cox, that “even absolutely certain documentary evidence concerning [the playwright’s] formation in the traditional faith would not amount to evidence that [he] retained that faith” as an adult.41 Hence, proponents of a steadfastly, if slyly, Catholic Shakespeare hunt for late Tudor A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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confessional “backwardnes” in his plays. When Prospero bids farewell in The Tempest, Richard Wilson hears “the most positive affirmation ever made on an English Renaissance stage of the Catholic belief in the power of intercessory prayer to the Saints and Virgin.” Wilson places great emphasis on the old magician’s final request that the playgoers’ “indulgence set [him] free,” explaining that both playwright, scripting his protagonist’s farewell, and playgoers, hearing it, had in mind the indulgences that circulated among English Catholics who assisted expatriate priests and Jesuits with the reconversion of the realm.42 But Wilson almost certainly overbids his hand. Of course, whether in Warwickshire or Lancashire, Shakespeare could have heard about— and have been impressed by—those expatriate priests, whom we met in the first chapter and will meet again in the third. Returning to England at great personal risk, they were intent on flaying the “faults and follyes” of reformed churches.43 But Shakespeare could also have been impressed by reformers’ indictments of those very same priests. Prospero’s talk of indulgences tells us neither that Shakespeare admired recusants who harbored seminarians and Jesuits from abroad nor that he thought less favorably of the church papists, who feared that the old faith was ill-served by overzealous advocates and who turned them away. Elizabethan Catholics had a range of reactions to the missionaries and to friends’ and adversaries’ advice that they accommodate the realm’s religiously reformed authorities. Some Catholics prayed for the “Roman” reconquest of England; others were unsettled by a premonition of the violence that unquestionably would have attended a reversal of that magnitude. Elizabethan Calvinist sentiments were pluriform as well; reformists, whom conformists believed to be too “forward,” accused accusers of too often looking backward, looking, specifically, to Rome.44 And the Calvinists’ controversies and quarrels gave William Shakespeare much to tell us about the religion around him, as we shall learn, although neither reformed nor unreformed religion appears to have tempted him devoutly to develop any readily identifiable and steadfastly held confessional opinions. We are not wrong to ask about his view of “unlawfull mynisters” in the Midlands— that question generates a few intriguing readings of his plays—but we would be unwise to expect a definitive answer.45 {  58  } 

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Shakespeare was in Stratford to marry in 1582 and stayed for the birth of his daughter soon thereafter. Chances are that he remained (or returned) for the birth of twins two years later. We may assume that he knew something of the conformists—John Whitgift, after all, was bishop of Worcester from 1577 to 1583—and of reformists, although there is nothing directly connecting him to Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright. As for local recusants and church papists, John’s as well as William’s familiarity with some—and perhaps with many—seems reasonable. Both father and son possibly met expatriate missionaries and Jesuits passing through. Conceivably, William Shakespeare was welcomed into Catholic circles yet was confessionally unaligned when he left Stratford for London, presuming that a resourceful player might do better by a growing family than a glover encumbered with his father’s debts.

Lo n don The Court was close to the city, as was the royal residence at Whitehall in Westminster. The government, that is, was a stroll down the Strand from London’s commercial district, the shops, taverns, and tenements that constituted the highest-density spot in England. Intellectual exchange around St.  Paul’s Cathedral was brisk. Outdoor preaching at Paul’s Cross attracted crowds, and the churchyard was fringed with bookstalls, from which readers bought what had just been published in their realm as well as pamphlets, books, and broadsheets from Scotland and the Continent. Bishop Aylmer’s scouts were busy during the 1580s in the very surrounds of St. Paul’s, listening for seditious conversation and looking for subversive literature. They hoped to stop the circulation of anything sold or said that would encourage papists rumored to be scheming in Holborn or puritans participating in secret clerical conferences, like the one in Aldgate where Thomas Cartwright was said to consult with local reformists when he came from Warwickshire.46 Aylmer was unfriendly to visiting dissidents and to outspoken reformists in his own diocese. The suppression of agitation for liturgical change was, for him, the sine qua non of responsible diocesan A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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policing. But, to reformists, policing was less important than preaching. They suggested that, rather than suspend persons protesting the established church’s liturgies, bishops should suspend unpreaching pastors and get rid of clerical colleagues who, like one “dumbe” Essex minister, “suffer[ed] noe other to preache” in his parish.47 But, on what we might call staffing issues, Aylmer and his immediate successors present what seems to be a creditable record. By 1603, there were more than five hundred preachers in the six hundred thirteen parishes in the diocese of London.48 Yet such statistics did not silence protests against the purges of pastors who refused, selectively, to use the Prayer Book. Shakespeare may have encountered one as he entered London for the first time—or while passing through Bishopsgate to and from the theaters in the suburb of Shoreditch. For, to avoid conducting funerals by the Prayer Book—that is, with the gestures and formula that it required—some nonconformists in the city exported their dead, carrying the corpses through London’s gates for burial and “unreverentlye tumblinge” them into pits.49 That Shakespeare met mourners during makeshift funerals is, admittedly, a wild guess, if only because the bereaved who defied authorized procedures presumably would have avoided a public display. But guesswork will be necessary while we are in London, as it was on our travels through Warwickshire and Lancashire, for no one registered the playwright’s coming and going in the city. We do not know precisely where or when he settled in St. Helen’s parish. We read only that creditors went looking for him there during the mid-1590s.50 The parish church had been part of a priory that was “dissolved” and dismantled earlier in the century. Thereupon, the local company of leather sellers purchased the nuns’ hall.51 Given Shakespeare’s Stratford experience, we can assume that he knew his way around leather and glovers. His father, John, had traveled to London and no doubt knew practitioners of his craft there. The company’s presence in Bishopsgate may have been the reason William took rooms in that ward. It was only a ten-minute walk from the playhouses in Shoreditch. A late seventeenth-century source supposes that Shakespeare lodged closer to the theaters, but the statement to that effect was stroked out, as if John Aubrey, who formulated it, learned something {  60  } 

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to the contrary later. Aubrey’s original is often trusted, but Bishopsgate seems a better bet, because there is no direct evidence that the playwright packed and traveled from Shoreditch to St. Helen’s, save for his coming home after a day’s or evening’s business was done.52 If he walked the main road, he passed St. Ethelburga and St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, his ward’s other parish churches. Their principal patrons, the Gresham family, with others’ assistance, made certain that there was plenty of preaching around Shakespeare. Thomas Gresham endowed a lectureship in the 1570s to correct for the “smattering of soom ordinarie points but slenderly handled in the pulpits.”53 In the 1580s, the vestry at St. Botolph’s financed weekly sermons to supplement the curate’s performances.54 And the Greshams were prominent among dozens of subscribers who contributed each year to pay the lecturers at St. Helen’s. The parish was in the queen’s gift, and she added a tidy sum for “a sufficient preacher” to fill the pulpit four times every year.55 From the 1570s, therefore, the ward was awash in sermons, some of which were likely unkind to Shakespeare’s profession. René Weis infers that patrons, playgoers, and government officials “contained” the criticism, to a point.56 But preachers were heard blending criticism of players and of playgoers with their arraignments of lewd behavior. John Stockwood referred to the theater as “a spectacle and schoole of all wickednesse and vice,” which Satan staged in the city’s suburbs’ “gorgeous playing place[s].” Sumptuous settings and “beastlye playes” made Londoners forget that their wards were “stincking puddle[s] of synne.”57 John Northbrooke of Bristol echoed Stockwood in 1579, similarly arraigning “vaine playes and other idle pastimes.”58 And Adam Hill of Wiltshire followed suit in a sermon delivered at St.  Paul’s Cross fifteen years later, while Shakespeare was lodging little more than a mile away. Hill exclaimed that he knew “not wherein there can be a more vicious corruption than in playes.”59 Preachers who frowned on theaters could be quite theatrical. Early in the seventeenth century, William Crashaw, preacher to the Inner and Middle Temples—among London’s law schools—apparently overdramatized his opposition to drama while preaching at St. Paul’s Cross. John Floyd, one of Crashaw’s more virulent Catholic critics, A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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complained that he “turneth the pulpit into a stage,” impersonating the very players he scolded for reciting obscene lines and making lewd gestures. According to Floyd, Crashaw compromised the dignity of the ministry; strutting and fuming “bitterly against players,” he made himself something of a spectacle.60 One of Henry Smith’s London sermons exploits the image of strutting players differently and memorably. It may have come to Shakespeare’s attention because Richard Field, who grew up with the playwright in Stratford and came to London just before him, was the printer who sent Smith’s sermons into the world in the early 1590s. The preacher was no friend to urbane auditors who were “unthankful” for, even contemptuous of, those husbandmen in the countryside who toiled with their hands to feed the realm’s cities. Yet Smith specially mentioned the value of London’s most urbane citizens “work[ing] with their penne” or reading their scripts, who supplied him with a grand metaphor. While wee play our pageants upon this stage of short continuance, everie man hath a part, some longer, some shorter, and while the actors are at it, sodainlie death steps upon the stage. Like a hawke which separates one of the doves from flight, he shootes his dart, where it lights there fals one of the actors dead before them and makes all the rest agast. They muse and mourne and burie him as they did the former, and play again.61 Literary historians catch the resemblance between Smith’s riff on the fragility and finitude of his parishioners’ condition and the remarks that Shakespeare drafted for Macbeth (5.5.22–27). Possibly, a number of reformist playgoers with good memories who got to the sermon and theater also made that connection. Still, that suggestion stays well shy of a sure thing. What we can say with certainty is that some reformists’ sermons around Shakespeare criticized players and playgoers alike, condemned papists, and censured conformist bishops, particularly Whitgift, Aylmer, and their more conservative colleagues, who, by then—the late 1580s and 1590s—were piloting the {  62  } 

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religiously reformed establishment. They were frequently criticized for making “ignorant men mynisters,” for reintroducing “popish legalism” into their realm’s churches, and for having “impeach[ed]” and “molest[ed]” England’s most conscientious preachers. As a consequence, reformists contended, the best and brightest young men declined places in the church.62 But the invective aimed at players, playgoers, and highly placed conformist prelates was intermittent; reformists’ drumming against Catholicism was constant. Preachers, on hearing that Catholic missionaries in prison defended their faith with “greate fury,” interpreted their passions or excitability as obstinacy and their faith as idolatry.63 And the reformists jumped at the chance that reporting intrigues among the religiously unreformed gave them to press the conformists to revisit the Prayer Book and to rid it of residual Catholic rubrics. The most outspoken reformists argued that diocesan executives’ failure to purge the old faith from their new liturgies could be construed to attest their “power and efficacie.” Their failure “to  embrace the gospel more than we have done” after God had so favored the queen and regime displayed ingratitude, destabilized that regime, and gave Catholics an advantage in argument. So said the prolific William Perkins, England’s most celebrated reformist at the end of the sixteenth century.64 From the late 1580s until his death in 1602, Perkins lectured and preached to students preparing for the reformed ministry in Cambridge. He left his native Warwickshire about the time that William Shakespeare finished his formal education there, and, within ten years, Perkins achieved an enviable reputation. His sermons attracted gifted young men, including William Crashaw, later his literary executor, to antipapal polemic.65 They heard Perkins explain that it was all too common, although unpardonable, to confuse “worship of society” with “worship of God.” The former prescribed devotion to saints, to the heroes in church history, “the chiefest and most glorious creatures” ever encountered on earth. But no fair-minded onlooker could deny that those heroes were “but creatures” and that to revere them was idolatrous. Perkins was quick with an alternative: to show appreciation for what God had done to restore the gospel in England, the A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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religiously reformed there must fashion a church in which “idolatrie,” the worship of society, was repudiated.66 Only when the worship of God was scrubbed of idolatrous elements could the faithful be certain of their election and free “from danger and from eternall vengeance.”67 Perkins submitted that the profession of a proper faith in what the Bible reveals about God, Christ, the Passion, and the Cross could (and should) have been “well maintained” alongside the Roman church’s saints and sacraments, yet when Catholic theologians worked out the implications of both the Passion and the Cross, they got the good news about a Christian’s liberation from the law all wrong. In effect, they made “the merit of the works of men concurre with the grace of God.” Their priests suggested to parishioners that divine mercy counted for less than human effort—less than the efforts of the saints, less than the piety of the credulous who crawled to and prayed before the saints’ relics, and far less than the approval of the clerical custodians of those relics. “Colored atheism” was what Perkins called all that—“colored” because Catholics’ praying and crawling dazzled with theatrical display and distracted. Too few cultivated gratitude and enthusiasm for the freedom purchased by Christ’s atonement. Could Catholics be “perswaded of the remission of [their] sins,” reach an “inward peace,” and comprehend the meaning of the singular sacrifice on the Cross when they saw gaudily attired priests re-sacrificing Christ with every Mass? How could Catholics appreciate what was given to them in and with faith while their priests touted the importance of merit earned by the prayers for the dead, by the indulgences they sold, or by pilgrimages and penances, which, as then practiced, “denied” or “overthrew” the faith their church professed?68 That was what William Perkins told his students in Cambridge— and what some of them, in turn, told the laity in London and around Shakespeare. For our convenience, Roman Catholic rebuttals can be recomposed as a short stump speech: prayers for the dead increase the laity’s gratitude for God’s mercy; pilgrimages summon the grateful and repentant faithful from their everyday—or ordinary— commitments to concentrate, for a time, on their savior’s extraordinary commitment to their salvation. Ideally, the company pilgrims kept en route to Compostella or Canterbury would “cause them all the {  64  } 

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while to meditate on the joys of heaven.” So reformers’ complaints might not have been necessary, yet Catholics had missed the point of penitential exercises, which was “to increase the love of the pepull” for God and for one another.69 The point of Catholic practice, Catholic polemics, and Catholic apology, Perkins proposed, was to keep the laity hostage to the clergy’s interests. Papists, he said, preferred “the devotion of the ignorant” to inquiries from the earnestly curious and to criticisms from biblically informed Christians. As far as he could (or cared to)  see, neither Catholic theologians nor parish priests were troubled that commoners had no vernacular translations of the Bible and prayed superstitiously to saints to protect their livestock. All was well, Perkins concluded, playing the part of a Catholic prelate, as long as the leadership of the old faith was unquestioned. Catholics’ leaders got what they wanted, a following for which “it sufficeth to give consent to the church,” which catered to, rather than corrected, parishioners’ firmly held yet preposterous ideas about celestial intervention.70 Perkins adored contrasts and exaggerated one between the uninformed consent that Catholic authorities purportedly preferred and the obedience of the religiously reformed, which, he proudly—if somewhat paradoxically—averred, promoted autonomy. “Generallie in all matters” pertaining to behavior, reformed laymen—attentive to the Bible—may trust themselves: “So in all things,” he advised, “aske your conscience what is to bee done betweene your neighbor and you, and she wil teach you.”71 “The worship of society” (or “worship of the creature”), he said, was founded not simply on priests’ and popes’ desires to influence and control the laity but also on ordinary Christians’ fears of emancipation and longing to avoid self-examination. It was easier to find a priest who could excuse than to confront a conscience that would accuse. Yet, Perkins boasted, the war against such fears and avoidance in his realm had already been decided in favor of the religiously reformed conscience. Preachers he trained were protagonists in a mopping-up operation; “occasions of idolatrie” remained. Busy and a bit zany, Shakespeare’s London was full of amusements, distractions, and temptations. Bible and conscience could easily go missing. Reformed Christians tended to forget that “we ought not to A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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addict our selves too much to the world” or to miss what ought to be at the center of the Elizabethan established church’s theology, the fact that—given the reformations earlier in the sixteenth century—the war on idolatry had been won. So, inasmuch as that forgetfulness was the rule, there was work yet for the likes of William Crashaw.72 That work, in short, was to keep “ignorance, superstition, and idolatrie” at bay in the parishes of London, some of which Shakespeare’s patrons populated—and some of which he passed as he went about his business.73 We concentrate on Crashaw, because he edited what Perkins had left unpublished at his death, and he relished that work, proclaiming that he was quite at home “in another man’s vineyard.” Yet Crashaw also composed his own pamphlets, documenting how the popes’ resistance to power sharing, for centuries, “abated and abased” episcopacy—and led to the “detruncation” of church government in England. But he took pleasure in reporting the success that Tudor bishops had, from the time of King Henry VIII, in reasserting regional autonomy and restoring what the papacy preferred to see in ruins.74 Crashaw read Catholics’ criticism of their own church and starred the scandals exposed in literature unfriendly to the popes. Apparently, what interested him most was Rome’s reported willingness to take bribes to overlook crimes committed by higher clergy. Catholic apologists, however, impeached Crashaw for misreading his sources and for distorting what those critics within the church were saying about the graft and greed there. When Catholicism’s Catholic critics discussed differences between what was done and what ought to be done, they rehearsed rumors about the former very tentatively: Si credere est dignum, “if information is trustworthy,” the critics would say. Crashaw deliberately deleted the conditional clauses, because they made it hard for him to give self-satisfied Calvinists in England the “kym kam”—the bogus images of an unreformed church—that seemingly substantiated their preconceived sense of superiority.75 Yet the Catholics’ objections probably circulated less widely among Londoners, and thus around Shakespeare, than did the reformers’ “kym kam.” Scandals made for compelling reading and preaching. Stories of malfeasance billowed into narratives that transformed Roman church officials into “cunning marchants” who gulled their {  66  } 

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fellow Catholics. Shakespeare would find and feature traces of that in English chronicles, as we shall see in another chapter, but Crashaw declared Rome the epicenter of religious corruption. Every pope’s publicists drew devotees to their city’s sacred sites: “No pilgrim, no penitent [or] suitor comes at Rome but he goes away well fleec’d.” All the shrines were traps, Crashaw alleged, insinuating that Catholic idolatry reinforced immorality. He conjured up one pilgrim’s progress during a jubilee year, a pilgrim whose sins were unrepented and whose expedition was meant to obtain papal absolution with strenuous effort but little to no transforming soul-searching. Crashaw’s imaginary pilgrim was an incorrigible sinner, yet he visited every recommended stop on the tour. He bowed before relics and saints’ images. Save for the inconvenience, he went unpunished. After having gotten what drew him to Rome—the pope’s pardon—he headed home to sin again, a perfect poster boy for Roman Catholicism’s “doctrine of libertie and looseness.”76 Crashaw guessed that feigned piety in the pope’s city—as well as the Roman church’s presumed willingness to tolerate “libertie and looseness” elsewhere—embarrassed “the wiser sort” among Catholics. In one sermon at St.  Paul’s Cross, he imagined how ashamed honest Catholics were when confronted with the evidence of the “rotten ripenesse . . . of poperie.” Crashaw’s studies led him to believe that the popes’ “owne broode” grew disenchanted with what had become of Rome and of Roman Catholicism, but he reserved special contempt for Jesuits who had not. They seemed to him cavalier or uncaring about corruption and superstition. Their dedication to the cult of the Virgin was another mark against them in Crashaw’s log; they waxed eloquent in select treatises and lyrics that idolatrously celebrated Mary’s milk, which nourished Jesus, but they overlooked the importance of Jesus’s blood. Roman Catholics generally—but Jesuits most egregiously—were insufficiently christocentric.77 Crashaw came to London in 1605, while Shakespeare was successfully staging Measure for Measure, with its slap at both puritan and Catholic conventual perfectionism, as well as King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth. Nothing connecting the preacher and the playwright will stand up to close analysis, but anti-Catholicism and a broader A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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anticlericalism, as we shall see, were in the air. The two, therefore, would have been hard for players and playgoers to miss, and the most intelligent among them would have known that apologists for the old faith did have an advantage over the religiously reformed on one count. The former, who used the press advantageously in England as a “surrogate for the personal, pastoral discipline exercised by the Tridentine episcopate and parish clergy on the continent,” accurately “braggeth of antiquity”; there was no denying that “Romish religion” had been around much longer than Calvinism. Crashaw conceded that much, yet he argued, notwithstanding the apologists’ assertions to the contrary, that Catholicism’s greater age did not translate into greater virtue. The papists’ church was older by far but also dilapidated and, “like an olde and rotten house,” ought to be demolished to make room for something sturdier.78 Catholicism’s age figured in another of Crashaw’s attacks, which compared unreformed religion to a wounded, diseased body, “not to be healed.” At  St.  Paul’s Cross, Crashaw offered his diagnosis: bad habits brought the old church down. Papal officials grew accustomed to receiving orders “from the pope’s mouth”—not from the Bible— from the mouths of church executives that had spouted superstition for so long, Crashaw continued, that the news of Christ’s atonement for the faithful had been obscured. Of those bad habits Crashaw presented as lethal wounds, Mariolatry was the worst. Nonetheless, the body and the church suffered terribly as well from the belief that a papal indulgence could speed souls through purgatory, from the anxieties stirred by the idea of purgatory, from papists’ indifference to the stews (brothels) in Rome (and to the incontinence of clerics who frequented them), and from the near deification of that city’s bishops. In Crashaw’s inventory, each horrid “habit” was a mortal wound, but the cult of the Virgin was, to his mind, the most unsubtly idolatrous, inasmuch as the reliance on Mary for mercy “so inlarge[s] the excellencie of the mother that wee diminish the glorie of the sonne.”79 Crashaw understood why Mary’s role was inflated in Catholic soteriology. Images of Mary made doctrine “readier and easier” for the unlearned. Representations of Mary in stone and paint gave mercy a presence that the homilies about God’s amnesty and Jesus’s {  68  } 

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atonement could not. Crashaw, however, concluded that there was no need for what he considered props. The golden calf at the foot of Mount  Sinai may have made God “readier and easier” to worship, he allowed, yet smashing the statue was the right thing to do. But he found that Catholics were loath to give up their cults; “I see to my grief,” Crashaw remarked, that Catholics “will not be healed.”80 Why preach, then, if Catholics were incurable—if, as Crashaw said, “little fruite” was to be expected in those quarters from the “greate labors” that he and his Calvinist colleagues were undertaking? Preachers, he replied, still must fulfill their “duties of admonition.” Besides, clever Catholic missionaries, he noted, were preying on London’s insufficiently admonished Jacobethan magistrates.81 Historians acknowledge that reformists’ fears, which sometimes approached panic, were real, yet the consensus is that the “rampant popery” around the city—around Shakespeare—and the “popish influence” at Court, all of which inspired the fears, were more imagined than real. Still, the torrential criticism poured from London pulpits. It rained down on Catholicism, and it is difficult to imagine anyone in London or the suburbs—leading citizens, commoners, playgoers, playmakers—avoiding that heavy weather. The influential, as noted, were naturally soaked with such sermons to ensure their cooperation. Lancelot Andrewes, preaching to King James, who, unlike his predecessor Elizabeth, was fond of theological discussion, fulfilled his duty of admonition by reminding his sovereign that Catholics’ ideas about merit, saints, and sacraments always came rigged to papal claims that the Roman church could “depose and dispose of [kings].”82 London’s Calvinists also discovered that warnings about the city’s and the Court’s drift toward Catholicism could serve confessionally intramural purposes; reformists and conformists used anti-Catholic rhetoric to criticize each other. The former harped on papists’ objectionable practices to dramatize their argument that conformist bishops had yet to revise comprehensively the established church’s liturgy, to reorganize distinctively Christian discipline or polity, and to distance emphatically reformed religion in the realm from “Romish religion.” Conformists’ anti-Catholic sermons coupled contempt for Rome with efforts “to underwrite the essential soundness of the A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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regime.” Had it not “stood so long in the breach against Rome”? But, that said, Calvinists also—oddly—heaped abuse on Catholics “to play down the significance of internal divisions,” as Peter Lake alleges, insofar as “every negative characteristic imputed to Rome implied a positive cultural, political, or religious value which [all] Protestants claimed as their own.”83 Still, internal or intramural divisions persisted and remained conspicuous parts of the reformed religion around Shakespeare in London. It is not unusual to find the same reformer, at different stages of his career, on different sides of the divide. Thomas Bilson complained about “unwritten verities . . . different from the scriptures,” which seemed to be the “groundwork” of a Christianity that relied too much on tradition. Subsequently, the same Bilson—older, more highly placed, and so no longer the same—defended conformists against whom reformist critics leveled the identical charge.84 By then—the early 1590s—Aylmer’s and Whitgift’s purges of nonconformists in London had taken a toll. Conformist Richard Cosin suggested that pamphlets critical of his friends were “verie rare.”85 Yet “verie rare” was very misleading. Dissidents managed to circulate Martin Marprelate’s invectives and to criticize church officials from the pulpits. Censors made certain that much went unpublished, yet the conformists were “miserablie vexe[d]” by critics. William James, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, mourned, at St. Paul’s Cross, that would-be ministers were changing course due to the deluge of “reproche and ignominie.”86 And John Whitgift, shortly after he became archbishop of Canterbury, regretted that “the wild tongues of the uncharitable [already] call me tirant, pope, knave.”87 Gervase Babington lamented that “grievous dissention amongst” religiously reformed Christians had become nightmarish, but he also berated reformists in a way that could only increase the grief. He blamed them for sermons that “blow the cole” and inflame the commoners against conformists.88 Hence, despite the established church’s attempts to minimize differences, reformists fired relentlessly at conformist adversaries, who, comprehending that the conflicts damaged all parties to them, nonetheless kept reloading complaints and arguments from their ostensibly inexhaustible arsenals of ill will. {  70  } 

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Could Shakespeare have ranged around London unaware of the conflict? Did he notice the occasional criticism of criticism? If so, he  would have appreciated the irony in one of Robert Temple’s sermons, which criticized conflict while perpetuating it. Temple assailed reformists for being too censorious and dismissive of conformists’ efforts to improve the ministry. He growled at reformist scolds who “affirm wee [conformists] have done nothing aright,” whereas they trusted that they could do nothing wrong. Temple dressed down the reformists for being woefully unself-critical; they did not see that “the froward offence of [their] owne fayth” drove the church into schism over “things indifferent.” Pitching for peace, Temple could not resist laying blame in a way that made for war. He conceded that “some thinges [were] amisse in the church,” agreeing that what was amiss should be discreetly set right. Still, reformists ought to “learne . . . to  love the bewty of God’s church,” he went on, indicting the faultfinders for having a misguided sense that church could not become “the honorable societie of the godlie” as long as it was “mixed with the shamefull corruption of the wicked.” In Temple’s estimation, there was no way, on earth, to turn the church into “a fellowshipe of perfection.”89 Thomas White was less kind than Temple. White’s sermon at St.  Paul’s Cross described obsessive, dissident reformist preachers as “fanaticall, freneticall, and satanicall.”90 Soon thereafter, as if on cue, visionary William Hacket arrived in London with two comrades who urged the leading reformists to heed Hacket’s prophesies of doom and to agitate for rapid changes in church government. Richard Bancroft was convinced that Thomas Cartwright and Job Throckmorton, both visiting London from Warwickshire at the time Hacket was making a scene on the streets with his mystifying predictions, had joined less celebrated members of the “London fraternitie” of nonconformists to egg on the eccentrics.91 Stephen Egerton, preaching regularly at Blackfriars, was listed with Cartwright and Throckmorton, and blacklisted, as one of the “chiefe propps and corner stones” of the disturbances; these men uttered “not so much as one word contrary” to Hacket’s small pack of wild extremists. Instead, Egerton and the others “secretly clap him on the back,” while they privately— among themselves—mocked his trances, mumbled prayers, and A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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crude manners.92 Historian Alexandra Walsham reads the situation somewhat differently—and, I think, correctly. She suspects that the reformists were ambivalent at first. Hacket was charismatic, yet the “Calvinist shaman” and his accomplices, with their impromptu, marathon prayers for the victims of Aylmer’s and Whitgift’s campaigns to suppress their critics—prayers that seemed apt to reformists—were especially embarrassing when séances, prayers, and prophesies were taken into the streets. Hacket was arrested and executed. One accomplice died while awaiting execution, and a third, Henry Arthington, “in regard of his penitent submission [was] set at libertie upon baile.”93 For reformists, the Hacket episode was a fiasco. Josiah Nichols later regretted how it brought “the ministrie into contempt.”94 The conformists cunningly related exaggerated claims about Hacket’s insight to reformists’ passion for preaching and suggested that the latter led to an indiscriminate admiration for—and reckless encouragement of—“foolish and hairbraine men,” “the fanaticall” element in the Calvinists’ camp. They were not unlike radical reformers on the Continent, Richard Cosin proposed, canvassing Hacket’s following and comparing their “vague and foolish conceits” to those that Martin Luther condemned. According to Cosin, the English conformists were Luther’s heirs; reformists were perfectionist sectarians who resembled continental Anabaptists and who threatened, as Swiss and South German Anabaptists did during the late 1520s and into the 1530s, a “dangerous reformation” of their already reformed churches. Hacket’s street-side gestures and insults were not symptoms of madness, Cosin insisted, although they showed that Elizabethan London—or the puritan parts of it—could momentarily presume that it was possible for “a clowne [to] teach a king to wear a crown.” No, madness and melancholy did not figure in Cosin’s narrative; rather, Hacket and the reformists who patronized him for a time formed a devious conspiracy to overturn the political as well as the established religious regime.95 Soon after Hacket’s execution, Lancelot Andrewes shared his assessment of the “calumnious” preaching to reform the reformation, which he characterized as not just “vague,” “foolish,” and “dangerous,” but “diabolical as well.” One could say so inasmuch as “the {  72  } 

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devill’s occupation [was] to defame,” and reformists were adept at defamation. To Andrewes, the unruly “evill speakers” in London were annoying, but the jeopardy was minimal. Although they were a windy lot, full of sound, fury, and schemes to perfect the realm’s religious devotion, they were “wanting the abilitie to go through withal.”96 “Their daring [was] above their skill,” Andrewes said, but the word “daring,” then and thereafter, more often referred to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who nearly catapulted over the Cecils to become Elizabeth’s closest adviser. We came across Devereux in the first chapter and learned why “daring” attached to his exploits, notwithstanding the results of his adventures that fell far short of his—and his queen’s—expectations. In 1599, he set out “to breake the necke” of the Irish rebellion led by the Earl of Tyrone.97 Essex had been told by Francis Bacon that Ireland was “enterlaced with the peril of England.” Rebels there could hand over “the approaches of this kingdom” to Spain—so the tussle with Tyrone appeared necessary to save the realm as well as to rehabilitate the earl’s reputation.98 He longed for the command and, getting it, left London with the crowd’s cheers in his ears but found it impossible to score consistently against moving Irish targets. So, without the queen’s authorization, he negotiated a truce. “Muster-weary Londoners” may have welcomed news of a pause in the fighting, but Elizabeth did not. Still, her displeasure with Essex’s near misses and half-successes at Cadiz, in the Azores, and in Ireland has far less importance for the study of religion around Shakespeare than the then common perception that his reputation as a leading patron of reformists and his “policy, valor, resolution, authority, and favor with the people” made the queen’s former favorite worth taking seriously as the likeliest fellow “to hold [English] protestants together against . . . popery.”99 Although, as noted, his patronage of reformists was less formidable than that of Leicester, a number of Essex’s chaplains were or went on to become influential reformists and conformists. The latter urged the former “to relinquish [their] stifnes,” and they defended the regime’s rights to compel them to do so.100 But Essex, in disgrace, could not intervene effectively to have suspended ministers reinstated, despite requests from his reformist friends. And he was A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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hardly well positioned to persuade ardent, outspoken reformists to be more patient—as his conformist friends wished. Did his disgrace and increasing ineffectiveness make him resentful, as rivals at Court suspected? They let it out that Essex’s resentment was tilting toward rebellion, and their saying so likely prompted him to become rather reckless. What followed seems to have confused all the principals and still confuses historians. Paul Hammer, however, maintains that it is wrong to characterize Essex’s next initiative as “pathetically incompetent”—as a failed, clumsy coup.101 We know that Essex summoned his supporters to London and that he intended to lead them to the queen’s chambers to submit a petition for the removal of counselors who were corrupt and, in his judgment, were “alltogether unfytte to lyve so neere her.” Predictably, he targeted for removal those who were transparently hostile to him.102 He expected London’s preachers would back him, but they backed off. Some partisans approached Shakespeare’s company, asking for and getting a performance of Richard II, Shakespeare’s play about an unpopular fourteenth-century sovereign deposed by his popular rival. Charges against the company were leveled but then dropped, after Essex was “dropped.” By then, an official account was taking shape, replacing uncertainties about motives and means with a story of treachery and its tragic results. For, by then, the earl, who had been intercepted on his way to Court and detained, had been tried and executed as a traitor, although he protested that he had never meant the “purposed mischief” attributed to him by the official account.103 Around Shakespeare, however, the earl’s protests probably were repeated less frequently than the official narrative that described how his daring turned into disloyalty, much to his misfortune. Reformist friends and retainers, who doubted the alleged transformation and who eulogized him too zealously—perhaps to compensate for their absences from his enterprise—were threatened with imprisonment.104 William Barlow, rehearsed, if not also scripted, by Robert Cecil and Richard Bancroft, aired the official account in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross. Five years earlier, from the same spot, Barlow preached a tribute to Essex’s bravery at Cadiz, but little in 1601 was as it had been {  74  } 

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then. Elizabeth’s government and almost certainly the queen herself were rattled by what the earl had tried, so Barlow’s funeral oration fretted about “the remainder [from] and contagion” of Essex’s latest and last “offence.” Because the offender exhibited exemplary remorse before his death, Barlow’s eulogy lodged his soul “with the saints in heaven,” while warning reformists not to trivialize their man’s “mischief.”105 But Anthony Wotton, one of Essex’s chaplains, defied the authorities. He claimed that the government, specifically Robert Cecil, misconstrued the earl’s February maneuvers and exaggerated his repentance. Wotton nonetheless came around, heeded Barlow’s warning, and accepted Cecil’s patronage. With only a veiled allusion to Essex’s early winter “error,” he preached in London against ambition for “worldly honor.”106 Conformists were probably less distressed than reformists by Essex’s fall. They heard that he had been meeting secretly with prominent puritans. Perhaps they suspected that he had contemplated coupling his complaints about corrupt political officials with objections to bishops’ halting efforts to revive parishioners’ devotional life. Or, possibly, conformists were inclined to exaggerate their jeopardy, to spin what might have been, and exaggerate as well the danger from reformists and their politically influential or ambitious patrons. Thomas Digges appears to have been typical of reformists who feared that conformists would conjure supposed threats, claim a narrow escape from them, and use them as an excuse to pick off the foremost, or most forward, critics of the queen’s religious settlement. Digges imagined that church papists and recusants crouching behind conformists—unseen by the queen and later by King James—were coaxing officials to stall the reformation of the reformed church in the aftermath of the earl’s collapse. Hacket’s “hairbraine” preaching and Marprelate’s barbed complaints about the trajectory and pace of church reform gave conformists ample ammunition.107 Might a time come (or was it at hand), Digges asked, when “priests [would] be tolerable men, but puritans may not be abidden”? That possible turn to “the right” and to Rome terrified him. He called conformists back to the origins of their shared commitment to reform: we “all be puritans with them which stand for the gospel”; “we are A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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all puritans in hart.”108 Digges’s efforts to create a polyphonic puritanism were too obviously born of desperation. Other reformists in the Essex network, however, more tactfully expressed their remorse for the religious contentions that their patron’s miscalculations had exacerbated. They joined other religiously reformed preachers and theorists in England who had wearied of intra-confessional warfare and hoped to put an end to “our hostilitie,” to “reprochfull taunts and slanderous libels” that could only have comforted Catholics. The words are those of William James of Christ Church, Oxford, who, years before the Essex episode, had illustrated the lesson that Digges and others would take to heart. James, that is, retold “an excellent story in Livy” in a London sermon, a story of a Roman soldier who slew three pursuers. He could do so, against the odds, because the three were wounded and therefore unable to coordinate their assaults on their single adversary. The application and conclusion followed: how foolish of reformists and conformists to wound each other while hunting a common enemy, and how strange that they expected to overcome Catholicism in England when they were so intent on mutual mutilation! James ended his sermon with a prophecy: “We in the chase of [our] Roman” must fail.109 Historian Arnold Hunt thinks that the lesson was not lost on the likes of Bancroft and Wotton. Their rhetoric remained heated, as we noted; plenty of mud was available for slinging on all sides. Yet Bishop Bancroft occasionally showed restraint, as did ardent reformist Stephen Egerton, at Blackfriars, London’s principal “puritan enclave.” And, Hunt claims, contemporaries detected a “working accommodation between authorities and the puritan clergy,” especially after Essex’s execution.110 Of course, a few unaccommodating reformist preachers kept barking at tyrannical conformist officials, and some conformists’ sermons kept complaining about overzealous, hypocritical puritan moralists. They achieved a degree of celebrity, but backroom bargaining appears to have preserved a modicum of religious and political stability, if not pamphlet and pulpit civility. Civility, however, was not always welcome, for, as preacher Anthony Maxey commented, Londoners loved a bloody brawl: “Men of the church at variance and contention hath {  76  } 

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ever beene laughing cheere to the ignorant multitude.” Surely, playwrights need not have been told that squabbles made for popular theater. “Faults and frailties”—if adroitly exposed—were entertaining. So, despite the conformity of many reformists who were “puritans in hart,” conformists were anxious about the opposition. Reformists could always attract an audience, anatomizing abuses of power and awarding “black marks” to those in authority.111

S ou t hwa rk E t Ce te r a The decision to move Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from Shoreditch to Southwark was made in 1598. The sons of Richard Burbage, who built the theater in the northern suburb more than twenty years before, determined that they would not renew the lease after Giles Allen, owner of the property, disclosed his terms. With the playhouse in place, Allen probably assumed that he had an advantage in the negotiations. But the Burbages dug in and moved out. They closed the theater when the lease expired, and the players worked with master carpenter Peter Street, who made plans to relocate. In late December, by lantern light, Street and his accomplices dismantled the building and carted the heavy oak pieces of the frame through Bishopsgate to a London warehouse. As soon as weather permitted, they reassembled the playhouse across the Thames. Allen called it larceny and sued, to no avail. The May rains gave the carpenter and his help more difficulties than did their litigious former landlord, yet by early summer, their new-old theater, a polygonal structure, was ready to accommodate nearly three thousand spectators and ready for the first performances of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Given the London council’s efforts to close the theaters—efforts to suppress all plays in 1595 and 1597—the business partners were smart to locate within the liberties of Paris Garden and the Clink, which were beyond the jurisdiction of metropolitan officials. Shakespeare owned 10 percent of the enterprise, the insignia of which, Hercules bearing the planet on his shoulders, gave the theater its name, “the Globe.”112 A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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Historians think that Shakespeare lived close to his investment. He may have moved across the Thames ahead of the theater, because a notice of his failure to remit a “subsidye” on his goods in St. Helen’s parish in the city and the diocese of London was referred for collection to the bishop of Winchester by late 1598. And that diocesan had jurisdiction over the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, in Surrey. Southwark was a spot to which rowdy Londoners repaired for a knockabout night. It was known for its brothels, bearbaiting arena, and playhouses—the Rose, soon to close, and the Globe, just opened. Southwark was also a “growing blue-collar suburb” with light industry and a number of desirable residential properties. David Daniell describes it as an ideal place for William Shakespeare’s “very reverend sport.”113 Shakespeare’s clownish curate in Love’s Labor’s Lost introduces that phrase, “reverend sport.” He referred to hunting, as did another of Love’s characters, pedantic Holofernes, whose sermon about deer, laced with Latin, also sanctified the chase (4.2.1–19). The playwright was poking fun at hyperbole in homilies, but the religion around him, at St. Saviour’s, within earshot of the Globe, was a far cry from what he spoofed in the comedy. We know so because the notes an admirer took during or right after sermons delivered by Edward Philips survive. Philips was preaching at St. Saviour’s in the late 1590s and was reputed to “forwarne of the furie of Sathan” to great effect.114 He suggested that his colleagues were worthless unless they warned from the pulpit, often and urgently, of wickedness (of “cruel or execrable” practices) to give parishioners an impetus and “an assured confidence to come boldly before the Lord . . . to crave pardon for [their] sins,” while corseting their desires to cross to Satan’s side.115 Yet preachers were to console as well as censure. Philips allowed that “the doctrine of great comfort” in reformed Christianity required frequent reiteration, because expatriate Jesuits were so adept at making reformed religious ideas appear “new” and “fantastical.”116 Central to the comforting good news, for example, was the notion that righteousness was imputed and not earned; such good news was as old as Christianity but was worth repeating not only to counter Catholics’ opposition but also to correct what industrious, enterprising {  78  } 

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locals learned elsewhere in Southwark’s growing entertainment district. The Thames Bankside was rife with commercial opportunities. Rewards there had come with ingenuity and effort; why not divine favor as well? As Philips grappled with theological questions of that kind, members of the parish vestry faced practical problems associated with growth. They were anxious in 1598 “to see howe the churche grounds may conveniently be spared” when a parishioner contemplated construction of storage facilities close by.117 And the vestry’s business became more complicated when new members were introduced. To the assembled vestrymen in 1606, it seemed “needeful” to add to their number, which then reached thirty and included several of Shakespeare’s associates.118 Philips was not among the antitheatrical puritan preachers, thought by subsequent generations to have lashed out at competition from playwrights whose popularity depleted congregations.119 Nonetheless, he could not have been pleased with the Globe, which attracted cutpurses and con artists who preyed on the patrons of Southwark’s newest spectacle. Perhaps rogues crossing the Thames to rob playgoers and others visiting the nearby stews and older amusements were the “bastardly brood of Abraham” to whom Philips referred in one of his sermons. Then again, he could also have had in mind “privy hypocrites” in his parish who were tempted by the depravity—and the business prospects—around them to forget English Calvinism’s “doctrine of great comfort.” Philips’s job, of course, was to make sure that they did not forget. He was bent on unspooling his parishioners’ sense of well-being and self-confidence, before both earned them “intol­ lerable torment” in their consciences, here, and hereafter in hell.120 The antidote for “privy” hypocrisy was self-incrimination, which was most effective when parishioners were spurred by sermons to confront their “ungodliness”—to measure the magnitude of their offenses, to experience godly sorrow for having offended, and to ask how they might make a better “reckoning of [God’s] favor.”121 Self-incrimination and contrition continued to be important parts of the old faith, as we shall discover in the next chapter, but Philips called Catholicism “Christianity overgrowne in the weeds of papacy.” He  thought that it was so “overgrowne” that priests could not see A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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that the faithful, though sinners, were “shrouded under the shadow of Christ’s wings.” To Philips, the faithful were redeemed by a righteousness imputed to them, in and with their faith. “Weeds,” in his version, were rules that papal theorists set down for their priests, rules by which priests inched parishioners back to an innocence that, he  trusted, Christ’s atonement had already won for them. Furthermore, Philips learned, maybe from Crashaw—and he was only too happy to pass it along—that the papal theorists, popes, and priests disregarded their own rules, “pamper[ing] themselves with wines and junkets.” Worse still, “puffed up with a pharisaicall pride of merit,” they got the order of salvation all wrong.122 Yet reformists acknowledged that rules played a role in the church’s charitable activities. The vestry at St. Saviour’s unconditionally offered help when plagues all but paralyzed the poor, but the parish normally expected recipients of aid to be worthy of it. One supplicant was given a month to “applye himselfe” and be a better provider for his children.123 From the pulpit, Philips nonetheless emphasized the importance of “the inward man”—and not the improvements in one’s circumstances and conduct. Salvation, unlike the material assistance from the parish vestry, depended exclusively on confidence that the Cross answered Christians’ cravings for pardon. They were cravings Philips preached to develop.124 The parish vestry, however, was ill-equipped to measure parishioners’ cravings. As we just learned, it was responsible for what we would call welfare administration and for discipline, although surviving records on that last count are unimpressive. Vestry members were “moved,” in 1600, “to take some order about [a parishioner] who had a childe by a woman, not beinge his wife.” A member who missed the meeting was delegated to inquire about the specifics, but they were left unsifted. The vestryman deputized to investigate later replied that he “woulde not medle.”125 The parish minister, on one front, was no meddler either. Philips kept his distance from the controversies about the theater, which preoccupied a number of his puritan colleagues. Unlike them, he seems to have been indifferent to playmakers and to the plays some of them staged a stone’s throw from his pulpit. The sermon notes that survive {  80  } 

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suggest that, instead, Philips focused on the ills of “the inward man,” on  “privy hypocrisies.” Nonetheless, he did have hard words for conformist authorities. During the faith’s first years, its officials, he remembered, were eager “fishers of souls,” yet conformist clergy in England seemed obsessed with landing the best “benefices and preferments,” he claimed, adding that the realm’s bishops were terribly negligent. They let unqualified men into the ministry. “Make no young plant a minister,” he told diocesans, who, to his mind, had forgotten that the “ministerie is no easie nor idle but a laborious office.” Philips, however, was no uncritical friend to the reformists making the same point. They, too, undermined the parish ministry, he said, by sanctioning the “preposterous zeale” displayed by rapturously self-confident preachers who played the part of prophets and who “leape into the ministerie,” being as fit for it “as a blind man to be a painter.”126 So, at St.  Saviour’s, the scope of the preacher’s concerns was somewhat limited, if the surviving sermon notes measure his interests rather than the scribe’s. Nearby, presumably, the playgoers’ interests— and Shakespeare’s—were broader. Entertainments abounded. Plays staged added to the other entertainments, bearbaiting and brothels, drawing Londoners across the Thames, save for those times when plagues visited the suburb and closed the theaters. One outbreak seems to have chased Shakespeare from Southwark in 1604. He found rooms to rent in London, a short walk from Cripplegate to the northeast and from St. Paul’s churchyard to the southwest. His flat was a few steps from the parish church of St. Olave’s.127 Chronicler John Stow tells us St. Olave’s was “a small thing,” unimposing and apparently in need of repair, for it was completely rebuilt in 1609. Charles Nicholl thinks that Shakespeare worshipped there, but there is no evidence of his attendance.128 He may also have taken an interest in the services at the church of St. Anne and St. Agnes, where Eusebius Paget often preached. Paget was a celebrity of sorts, extraordinarily industrious and notorious for the liberties he took with prescribed liturgies. For years, with Gilby, as we have learned, and later among Cornwall reformists, he earned a place high on the conformists’ lists of most unwanted nonconformists, although he professed that he meant “no offense” to Prayer Book or prelate.129 Nonetheless, when A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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King James rejected reformists’ petitions to alter his new realm’s “well setled” religion, in 1604, Paget and his puritan friends pulled their punches. His colleague Stephen Egerton explained, We ought not to separate us from God’s service, knowing that those that were polluted sate in Moses’ chaire, so we should so receyve those thinges that be holie as the sacraments of the faith and the ordinararie means of our salvation of our pastors and teachers, how bad livers soever they be, for who would be so fond as having a gracious gift sent him by the prince . . . to refuse it because he knew the messenger that presented it to him to be a wicked and prophane person. So though the estate of many ministers in respect of themselves be wretched, yet in respect of their functions we are not to withdraw our selves from them nor to sett light of their doctrine.130 Separatist congregations had been withdrawing for several decades. Dropouts—individually or in clusters—went abroad and joined religiously reformed expatriates on the Continent. Others stayed and met for worship in private homes or in fields around London. Egerton wanted to stay in the established church’s ministry, urging auditors, as Philips did, to turn inward. Battles against Satan were waged there, and “oure slouthe,” Egerton said, gave the devil “dominion over us.”131 The reformists and conformists alike went to great lengths to dispel doubts that the devil existed. Preaching at St. Paul’s Cross, Thomas Bilson described “the paynes of the damned” so energetically that everyone in the churchyard felt the lost souls—brought low into Satan’s underground—move the ground beneath their feet. Reports of the tremors suggested that even “the gravest and wisest” feared the cathedral might collapse.132 The purpose of sermons such as Bilson’s was to inspire repentance, to stir what historians now call a “soul-wrenching experience” that might save Christians from the “pullulating cesspit of carnal, covetous, idolatrous sins” that commercial, crowded, playgoing London had become.133

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The historians’ depiction is quite vivid, yet today’s scholars studying the theater and the religion around it would be remiss to overlook the crime, disease, and clutter attending London’s phenomenal growth in the Jacobethan period. And the historian of early modern English religion must face the probability that Shakespeare was much more likely to discuss the city’s challenges and changes with influential laymen who met and managed them, respectively, than with the preachers who railed against players and playgoers. James Holstun reminds us that the playwright from Stratford was a businessman who demonstrated considerable commercial “cunning.”134 He might well have been drawn to other successful entrepreneurs, men like Peter Benson, who was a member of the vestry at St. Olave’s when Shakespeare lived across the street from the church. We may assume, therefore, that as a vestryman Benson monitored affairs in his parish, but we also catch him solicitous of parishioners elsewhere—that is, at the church of St. Alphage’s, Cripplegate, a parish in which he looks to have been developing real estate. Benson promised that he would stop work on his property near the church or make adjustments, if its completion would “hinder or darken the light belonging to [that] church.”135 But we cannot be sure that Shakespeare talked over business opportunities with Benson or that he compared investments with other lay officials at neighboring churches—at St.  Olave’s, St.  Alphage’s, or St. Alban, Wood Street.136 Yet, if he did, we may be confident that he learned about the financial crises that were epidemic in London. Revenues disappointed at St.  Alphage’s, close to where Benson was building. The church was “in much decaie and great danger”; the steeple, windows, and roof required repair to an extent “farr above the abilities of the parryshioners” to subsidize.137 At St. Olave’s, Jewry, on Shakespeare’s likely route from Silver Street to the Globe, the vestry was desperate. “In debt for repayring of the church,” the vestrymen traded exemptions from local offices for ready cash. In 1607, Humphrey Weld, a noted puritan philanthropist who would soon become lord mayor and who intended “shortly to come to dwell in this parish,” was approached first for a loan and subsequently asked for gifts.138

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Of course, some citizens—Weld, for one—prospered, and from 1604  Shakespeare rented rooms on Silver Street from Christopher Mountjoy, who did well selling ornamental headgear to prostitutes and playmakers. One client, George Wilkins, lived close, owned several brothels, and happened to be a fledgling playwright as well as a pimp. He worked with Shakespeare, assisting him to impart a degree of verité to several plays’ depictions of local stews.139 Yet Mountjoy had other, more respectable connections. He had arrived in England from France immediately after the massacre of Huguenots in 1572. He worshipped with other Calvinist newcomers at the city’s “strangers’ church,” where refugees from the Netherlands and France let on that they had a good working relationship, la vray concorde, but friction between the two sets of religiously reformed exiles had developed by the time Mountjoy took in his tenant. The Dutch refused to allocate space in the churchyard to bury French pastors.140 The problem, they said, was that leasing the gravesites could attract unwelcome attention, just as some London citizens were planning to reclaim the church that had been given to “the strangers” sixty years earlier. King James, in general terms, expressed support, proclaiming he had “always been favorably disposed toward foreigners who, for the sake of reformed religion, must become refugees.” But the new king left the specifics to others and was not expected to intervene, should his Council be reluctant to renew the refugees’ privilege to govern themselves without English bishops’ supervision. James’s predecessor had permitted that much-prized privilege to lapse.141 It was resented by conformist diocesan officials who argued that the French and Dutch Calvinists encouraged levels of lay involvement and local control that inspired English reformists to press for similar arrangements. And although pressure had been resisted by the government—into the new king’s reign—parishioners in London, who sympathized with reformists and disliked the conformists’ resistance to change, were said to “refuse contemptuously their own churches” and to worship at the “strangers’ churches.”142 We do not know whether Shakespeare ever worshipped with them. He seems to have been comfortable among the émigrés. It is hard to imagine that he would not have heard, soon after he rented rooms {  84  } 

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above Mountjoy’s shop, that their church was pursuing senior leadership and that overtures from London were rejected by pastors on the Continent.143 If Mountjoy had not talked about the problem, perhaps Richard Field, Shakespeare’s Stratford friend, did. Field married a Huguenot, and the couple’s parlor at Blackfriars was frequented by “strangers.”144 The playwright may have learned during one of his visits with Field (or from general theater gossip) that a theatrical company of Chapel Children intended to vacate the great hall at Blackfriars in 1608. Shakespeare promptly joined a small pack of colleagues and picked up the lease, thereby acquiring a second venue for his company, the King’s Men. The recently roofed theater at the former Dominican priory accommodated fewer playgoers than did the Globe, but the chill usually closed the latter from September to May. The enterprise seemed wise, and we can now get a better glimpse of what competed for the entrepreneur’s attention: the managerial matters related to running two theaters—providing plays and players, drawing crowds, repairing facilities, reinvesting revenues, not to mention the vexing, formidable challenges that surfaced when the company took to the temporary stages at Court or performed on tour when plagues closed London’s theaters. After a fire gutted the Globe in 1613, he may have figured he’d had enough. He sold his share in that theater rather than subsidize reconstruction. He may have contemplated scaling down his commitments before the blaze; Stephen Greenblatt thinks so and believes the fire made him “more decisive.”145 Yet the playwright purchased the gatehouse at Blackfriars only three months before selling his share of the Globe. He might have acquired the gatehouse as an investment, but historians’ nets only catch a tenant four years later. Richard Wilson, ever on the lookout for Shakespeare’s Catholic sentiments, thinks he bought the gatehouse as a monument to those Jesuits on the run who had hidden there and used its secret passages from Blackfriars to the river.146 Park Honan, however, has a more down-to-earth explanation. He speculates that Shakespeare purchased the perfect pied-à-terre for someone with plays in performance at the Globe and at Blackfriars. The flat was splendidly situated for a London playwright whose investments in A r o u n d S h a k e s p e a r e   { 

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property and tithes in Warwickshire—and whose family—increasingly drew him to Stratford.147 In Stratford, he would have noted that “a puritan or staunchly Protestant clique of aldermen and burgesses” had taken control of the religious and political affairs of the town.148 Arguably, Shakespeare was more interested in efforts to enclose the meadowlands. Engrossers expected that their hedges would be unpopular with the commoners and that the “disorderlie” and “unsivell” among them, chafing at the restrictions, would cause trouble.149 As it happened, however, local entrepreneurs and magistrates led the opposition and asked Shakespeare to join them in seeking an injunction. He and they, having invested in shares of tithes, were sure to be disadvantaged, should the acreage in question be enclosed and converted to pastureland. But instead of defending crops against sheep, Shakespeare independently came to terms with the engrossers, who agreed to compensate him for any “detriment,” should their cause prevail.150 The London playwright and local entrepreneur, that is, stayed above the fray. And he appears to have positioned himself similarly in relation to the controversies that characterized the religion around him, the disagreements about further reforming the realm’s reformed religion and bouts among Catholics and between the Catholics and Calvinists. For all we know, he was unfazed when his daughter Susanna was cited by the vicar of Holy Trinity in Stratford for failing to receive the Sacrament at Easter. Was he relieved when the case was promptly dismissed? Was he pleased when she decided to marry one of the prominent members of the “Protestant clique” that had been gaining influence in town, physician John Hall? Shakespeare welcomed his son-in-law to Blackfriars when the latter was in London, and Hall may have coaxed his host to one of Stephen Egerton’s sermons at Blackfriars. Even if he failed, Egerton was part of the religion around Shakespeare, as, most definitely, was Hall, whom the playwright named his executor. Thomas Quiney, his other son-in-law, was a ne’er-do-well, arraigned for incontinence a few months before his father-in-law died. Quiney’s name, written into Shakespeare’s will, was crossed out. Susanna was the principal beneficiary, and there were legacies for others—but nothing for the church.151 {  86  } 

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Interlude

The church got nothing in Shakespeare’s will; the academy has been a busy beneficiary. Historians have been left plenty of passages in the plays—characters and conflicts as well—that seem to be symptoms of or clues to the playwright’s piety. What Leah Marcus describes as “a fierce desire for decoding” the drama, which playgoers find forever fresh but which summons scholars to recontextualize, results in rival interpretations of Shakespeare’s religious devotion. Literature on his confessional commitments keeps piling higher. Much of it suggestively identifies what Shakespeare explores; much of it, I think, unconvincingly details what Shakespeare endorses.1 Once an endorsement is alleged—nearly any religiopolitical endorsement—pastoralia from the plays can be raked into its exposition: sacraments, sermons, saints, puritans, prayers, penances, friars, and such. Take, for example, one of the most often rehearsed passages in the history plays, King Henry V’s lively lecture at Agincourt (4.3), from which both Catholic and Calvinist sympathies can be inferred. Henry promises his troops—few against the French many—that their heroism would be remembered “to the ending of the world.” For they would fight on Saint Crispin’s day. And the next day commemorated the martyrdom of Saint Crispinian (in the play, Saint Crispian). “Yearly . . . vigil feasts” were celebrated for each before and after 1415, when the king and his “happy few” won at Agincourt, although not after the Tudor religious reformers had revised the old faith’s calendar—not in 1599, when the play was first performed. Did Shakespeare draft the king’s inspirational address (“we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”) to endorse Roman Catholicism or the reformers’ liturgical winnowing? Did he miss saints’ days, the feasts of Crispin

and Crispinian, the patron saints of glovers and of others who worked with leather, with whom he was familiar in Stratford and in St. Helen’s parish in London? Or did his remarks about the day-after-day commemorations (“and Crispin Crispian shall never go by”) endorse, instead, the removal of calendar clutter undertaken by the Calvinists? What do we have here? Nostalgia? Relief? Indifference? Shakespeare and his religious convictions are not the topics of what follows, so we may leave this passage’s piety or impiety undeciphered, save to speculate that he might have relished the idea that no pope, priest, or preacher could keep Henry V’s promise (courage commemorated “to the ending of the world”) as well as the glover’s-son-turned-playwright who formulated that promise. Readers, however, may object that Religion Around Shakespeare is remiss, especially as it turns from its subject’s whereabouts to a few of his plays, if it refuses to comment on his piety. For some expect that writing on religion betrays a writer’s religion! I do not expect it and would suggest otherwise, but, in this interlude, I want only to repeat that shuffling Shakespeare’s saints, sermons, bishops, puritans, soliloquies, and sacraments into a consistently, albeit covertly, held religious position is beyond my powers of perception and repossession. The playwright eludes me. He sounds quite unlike his creature Oswald, Goneril’s steward in King Lear, who is eager “to show . . . what party I do follow” (4.5.41–42). I cannot make the plays tell us about his religious partisanship. But taking various parts of the plays’ pastoralia as specimens of the anxieties and ambivalences that punctuated the piety, protests, and religious polemic around Shakespeare is worthwhile, and it is tantamount to treating them as historical evidence for the late Tudor and early Stuart—Jacobethan—attitudes toward religious leadership (chapter 3), religious personality (chapter 4), and religious community (chapter 5). Let us begin.

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3 religious authority

“ T he K i n g - Q u e l l i ng D octr i ne of P op e ry” Predictably, the “powder plot” got the government to tighten security. James’s English subjects, save the nobility, were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king’s regime—and the nobility’s exemption ended after Henry of Navarre, King Henry  IV of France, was assassinated in 1610. Oath takers swore to “abhor, detest, and abjure as impious and heretical this damnable doctrine and position that princes [who are] excommunicated and deprived by the pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects or any other.”1 James looks to have had a clause denying the pope’s spiritual jurisdiction omitted, prompting historian Anthony Milton to suggest that the new king, in concert with his Council, formulated the oath to accommodate the “moderate Romanists”—so submission would be easier for them—and to isolate expatriate extremists. Not so, says Michael Questier; he holds that the oath was scripted to dispossess papists of the papacy, that the phrase repudiating papal power to order Catholics to remove the “princes, which be excommunicated and deprived” by

Rome, was an outright rejection of papal primacy. For Questier, the oath was “a diabolically effective polemical cocktail.” To Jesuits and like-minded militants, English subjects who swore “to abhor, detest, and abjure” were denying papal prerogatives that braced the universal church’s authority. To the king’s men, subjects who so swore were unreservedly, politically responsible.2 To the religiously reformed in England, political prerogatives claimed for the papacy “perniciously,” “impiously,” and unscripturally undermined secular authorities. The power “to bind and loose” allocated to the apostle Peter in Matthew’s gospel (16:18–19), they claimed, was never meant to apply to governments. The jurisdiction ceded to Jews’ high priests in Deuteronomy (17:8–13) was never meant to justify papal intervention in European politics—and certainly not to sanction the political assassinations that some popes reportedly planned or approved. Rome’s friends in England objected when they were accused of being part of a “trayterous conspiracie” originating among the Jesuits, but reformists answered that English Catholics, abroad and at home, were always trying to “stirre up foraine power to assault the realme and perswade the people of this land with armes to displace their prince.”3 Conformists and reformists agreed that the most sinister recent example of the Roman church’s treachery was Pope Pius V’s excommunication of their queen in 1570. But, in 1588, Pope Sixtus V appeared to have offended as egregiously. Shamelessly and straightforwardly, he “exhorteth her people to lay hands on her” once Spain invaded.4 Such coaxing was not unprecedented. Pope Innocent  III did much the same in the early thirteenth century, and that story was often told in early Tudor antipapal polemic. Henrician reformers remembered King John as a casualty of papal intrigue. Evangelical activist William Tyndale was haunted by Innocent’s success in getting the English nobility to forsake their sovereign.5 John Bale’s play King Johan lionized the royal victim of the Roman church’s realpolitik; later, Anthony Munday accused Rome’s thirteenth-century hellhounds of having incited English subjects to rebellion and regicide—and of having invited the French to invade.6 William Shakespeare’s King John makes papal legate Pandulph the principal villain and puts him at the center of what Park Honan {  90  } 

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now describes as “a world of deceit and compromise in which religion itself is political.”7 The chroniclers had recounted how the monks of Canterbury prodigiously insulted John by electing as archbishop the pope’s candidate, Stephen Langton. And it was common knowledge that the king retaliated by expelling the electors from the realm. Sixteenth-century narratives amplified John’s defiance. He became “a proto-Protestant hero,” Jonathan Bate says, yet, if Beatrice Groves is correct, Shakespeare was having none of that; his King John simply shifts focus, concentrating not on the king but on his brother’s rightful heir, Arthur.8 Nonetheless, John’s defiance in the play is critical for our purposes. The king becomes an emblem, exhibiting the kingdom’s mistrust of papal and archiepiscopal authority. He crosses Rome and Canterbury. The papal legate Pandulph is furious: “by the lawful power that I have,” he proclaims King John “curst and excommunicate”: And blessèd shall he be that doth revolt From his allegiance to an heretic And meritorious shall that hand be called, Canonized and worshiped as a saint, That takes away by any secret course Thy hateful life. (3.1.98–104) John counters, lathering his responses with insolence. His indignation, as we shall see, rivaled that of the most devastatingly critical Jacobethan antipapal polemicists: “Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name so slight, unworthy, and ridiculous to charge me to answer as the pope.” “No Italian priest shall tithe or toll in our dominions,” John says, finishing with a slap at the pope’s “usurped authority” as friendly King Philip of France listens. Philip, with whom, offstage, John had just concluded a mutually beneficial truce, warned against further bravado, but the English king was in no mood to be muzzled: “You and all the kings of Christendom are led grossly by this meddling priest,” he scolds Philip, promising that, if need be, England would stand alone against Pope Innocent’s treachery (75–89). R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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And John takes the same stand in a related dramatization of his “troublesome reign,” where Pandulph, by reply, pardons in advance any of the king’s subjects who “shall carry arms against or murder” the king. John’s prompt rejoinder in this second text seems more a poke than a punch: “The more the fox is cursed, the better á fares.” “If God bless me and my land,” he goes on dismissively, “let the pope and his shavelings curse.” Yet Philip is disposed to take Pandulph’s part, committing “France [to] fight for Rome and Romish rites.” Only then, in The Troublesome Reign of King John, does John pledge to dissolve England’s monasteries, which—as playgoers would have known—was just what King Henry  VIII, with Thomas Cromwell’s prompting, had done by 1547. Only a few lines before, in the script, John professed to “honor the church and holy churchmen,” but the play wants to say that Pandulph’s influence on the scene precipitated the king’s confiscations.9 Troublesome was printed without attribution in 1591, but the editions of 1611 and 1622 named Shakespeare as the playwright. The play’s similarities with his King John make that seem plausible, yet the problem of authorship has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.10 And it need not trouble us here; for us, the papal legate’s interventions in each play are particularly important, as are the protests against papal “tyrannie,” which punctuated the religion around both plays. Andrew Willet, for one, fumed that popes and papists too long laughed off “God’s ordinances” in Romans 13, which required submission to the rulers of this world. Willet, who lectured at St. Paul’s Cathedral and in Ely, pointed out that the early modern Roman Catholic Church required rulers to submit to its executives. Popes and their deputies unrepentantly choreographed regime changes in England and across the Continent when submission was refused. The “Antichrist of Rome subdued emperors and made them his servants,” Willet said, amply illustrating his claim with stories drawn from medieval history. One may be excused for thinking that he was mobilizing his queen’s religiously reformed subjects to resist Rome’s next political adventure, although he allowed himself a spot of optimism, confiding that “we doe hope [the Antichrist’s] date is out.”11 How widely was Willet’s hope shared? Did English Protestants expect that the popes’ Pandulphs would never again interfere? Onstage, {  92  } 

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Shakespeare’s papal legate is fabulously successful. He pries Philip of France from his alliance with John, sabotaging the “deep-sworn faith, peace, amity, and true love between [their] kingdoms” (3.1.157). But Matthew Sutcliffe did not need any dramatization; he learned from medieval chroniclers how resourceful Rome had been in finding ways to overcome royal reserve and turning the princes of Europe against one another.12 Jacobethan critics claimed that popes had been master manipulators within the Catholic Church as well. The popes’ apologists excelled at arguing that Rome’s relative antiquity gave its bishops unrivaled authority. They demanded that the popes’ episcopal colleagues swear, “perjuriously,” that Rome was mater omnium, “mother of every other” church, forgetting about the older patriarchal sees of Jerusalem and Antioch. Cambridge reformist William Perkins detailed what he identified as the deceits at the foundation of the Roman “regiment,” concluding that sensible Christians would not be fooled. With a little help from reformers’ antipapal polemics, any fair-minded person could see that popes were “manifest usurper[s]” comparable to “theefes in a true man’s house.”13 According to reformers, papal deceit was easily exposed. For example, Rome’s claim to open (and close) the gates of heaven to princes was based on the preposterous notion that, as Saint  Peter’s successors and intimates, popes could routinely order around the blessed gatekeeper. Saint  Peter could be persuaded by popes even to admit unworthy, ruthless assassins whom they had absolved in advance for killing enemies of the Roman church. Popes themselves were known for “lawlesse crueltie,” for conduct unbecoming, which, their critics pointed out, made them ineligible for admission to the very celestial spaces they pretended to reserve for their see’s friends. Princes were idiots to believe that their papal patrons, who were excluded from heaven, could ensure others’ entrance.14 Of course, the princes of this world had been encouraged to trust Rome’s influence over the next by far-fetched interpretations of biblical tales of kings punished for having doubted or denied the authority of their high priests. Reformists and conformists alike set about to dismantle those arguments—to explain that they were laced with absurd inferences R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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drawn from Old Testament confrontations between statesmen and religious authorities, none of which supported what Gabriel Powell called the “king-quelling doctrine of popery.”15 Pandulph was adept at “king-quelling” onstage and bragged about his powers. Without the advice or consent of local barons, he could play kings against each other, whip up or “hush” heavy political weather, and inspire coups that could unsettle entire territories. Immediately after Shakespeare’s King John yields his kingdom to Pandulph and Pope Innocent to avoid “overthrow incurable” and receives it again as a papal fief, the papal legate boasts that “it was [his] breath that blew this tempest up upon your stubborn usage of the pope”: But since you are a gentle convertite My tongue shall hush again this storm of war And make fair weather in your blust’ring land. On this Ascension-day remember well, Upon your oath of service to the Pope, Go I to make the French lay down their arms. (5.1.17–24) Philip and John are, in Shakespeare’s art, little more than Pandulph’s pawns. They and Philip’s son (“how green you are,” 3.3.145) are no match for Rome’s man. The closest playgoers get to an astute analysis of his political dodges and derring-do (and, arguably, the closest they get to a protagonist in King John) is John’s bastard nephew, illegitimate son of his eldest brother, Richard. Such a conclusion would have come as no surprise to the political cynics in the stalls. “Commodity, bias of the world,” rules (2.1.574). Self-interest and self-importance give no ground to honor, they learned from the Bastard. So, to succeed at Court, one must relentlessly play for advantage. To prevail in politics one must play one’s peers craftily, albeit—for patrons of the play—transparently. The Bastard declares, in effect, that he is ready to amputate his conscience: “Since kings break faith upon commodity, gain, be my lord,” he says, “for I will worship thee” (597–98). But he is pretending. The Bastard is no Pandulph, whose “incendiary mixture of moralism and cunning . . . fuel[s] the extraordinary {  94  } 

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violence of the . . . play.” Historian Tim Spiekerman holds that the legate “reveals himself as a naked Machiavellian,” poised to manipulate and corrupt the characters around him.16 True, Philip of France nearly slips from Pandulph’s grasp and, curiously, flirts with virtue, yet the papal deputy assures him that his “giddy loose suggestions” (3.1.218)—Philip’s temptations to keep the peace with England, because the truce was sealed “with all religious strength of sacred vows” (155)—are irreverent, notwithstanding what must have seemed at the time the sacrality of the proceedings. The vows were “sworn against religion” (205), Pandulph confirms, meaning that the two monarchs reached their agreement “against the interests of the Roman church.” Besides, the Roman church had often absolved princes of their oaths to each other, he notes, adding that popes and their legates were also known to have absolved subjects of solemn oaths to their princes. Was that a threat? It was certainly an expression of that “king-quelling doctrine of popery.” Shakespeare may have been registering his dissent, inasmuch as Pandulph’s intrigues had such ill effects. But a case could be made that “commodity” was the playwright’s principal target, although what appears most striking—from this distance—is the infectious corruption originating in the legate’s desire to advance his church’s political interests and influence, the dramatization of which was pitched to Jacobethan mistrust of prelates in politics. But English bishops’ political involvements were de rigueur; well-positioned prelates served their sovereigns (or their sovereigns’ rivals) during the dynastic struggles of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which Shakespeare rescripted in his history plays. Onstage, in his Richard II, the bishop of Carlisle predicts the “woes” that would afflict England for over one hundred years (4.1). Chronicling them, the playwright blamed aristocratic factions, and clerical complicity got off lightly. In Richard III, Thomas Bourgchier, archbishop of Canterbury and cardinal, seems more a buffoon than a villain. He declares himself the custodian of “the holy privilege of blessed sanctuary” (3.1.41–42) which royal charters awarded certain cathedrals and convents, permitting bishops and abbots to shelter refugees from creditors and kings. The privilege was controversial, in part, because fugitives R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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were known to leave the safety of sanctuary, to run riot, and to return for protection. During civil wars, the enemies of the government swarmed to “blessed sanctuaries,” which had become safe places to plot regime change.17 Shakespeare’s Bourgchier defends the privilege at first, when Richard of Gloucester, uncle and guardian of King Edward V and his younger brother, tries to “fetch” them from Westminster, the refuge to which they fled with their mother. (Alive, the brothers—Richard’s nephews—stand between him and the crown he covets.) Bourgchier improvises what Raphael Holinshed remembered as “a goodly gloze by which the place may defend” a guilty rogue but not an innocent prince.18 Debtors, crooks, and traitors would be safe, yet the young princes were none of the above; therefore, they were not entitled to the privilege. The archbishop evicts the two heirs apparent and, in effect, licenses their murder. Did Shakespeare mean to imply that Bourgchier had connived with Richard and his coconspirator Buckingham? The play yields only enough to permit us to suggest that the prelate was too susceptible to the latter, who nudged him, at Richard’s prompting, and who promised that Gloucester’s nephews would be safe. Bourgchier, that is, did not want to seem “too traditional,” “too senseless-obstinate,” in the matter (the phrases scripted for Buckingham and delivered, no doubt, as censures; 3.1.44–45), so he ordered the boys from sanctuary and promised their mother no harm would come to them. But, in life and onstage, the two boys were obstacles Gloucester had to clear en route to becoming King Richard III; so, in life and art, they were killed in the Tower of London. Shakespeare wrote nothing about Bourgchier’s reaction. Arguably, then, Bourgchier onstage was a dupe rather than a calculating, sinister accomplice. But the same cannot be said about Shakespeare’s Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester and cardinal. Beaufort is malicious and duplicitous. Even as he vows to end his evil ways and to be less contentious, he confides in an aside that he is dissembling; he never intends to reconcile with his archrival, the prudish Duke Humphrey of Gloucester.19 Beaufort had been King Henry V’s chancellor and uncle. He and Gloucester were appointed guardians for Henry’s young son and {  96  } 

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successor, Henry  VI.  In fifteenth-century political practice, the bishop was discreet; in Shakespeare’s script, he is not.20 And the script gives Humphrey of Gloucester an edge of sorts, making him morally superior to the bishop, whose ambition “to make his cardinal’s cap co-equal with the crown” is glaringly obvious even while Henry V rules.21 But Henry VI, a pious, impressionable “schoolboy” when he inherited the Crown, is soon “overawe[d]” by Beaufort’s pretend piety. Once Beaufort removes Gloucester, whom he eventually has murdered, the bishop can have his way with the young king, whose mind beneath the crown is “bent on holiness.”22 Chroniclers depicted the struggle between duke and bishop differently—and much more favorably to the bishop. Holinshed’s Humphrey was a tricky figure, always at work behind the scenes to discredit Beaufort at Court. But Shakespeare’s plays ensured that the bishop and cardinal would come off as a “wolf in sheep’s array,” as a “scarlet hypocrite,” and as a Machiavellian cleric who neither deserved nor got good press.23 But does that bad press give away the playwright’s attitudes toward highly placed and politicized prelates as well as toward the aristocracy with whom they feuded? Literary historian Nicholas Grene has no doubt that “the scales of audience approval would have been tipped towards Gloucester” and away from his “unmistakably wicked” rival. But Grene explains that the playwright scripted exchanges to formulate the “Gloucester-Winchester feud as an almost impersonal force for destruction.”24 Might the unstatesmanlike conduct of both parties have been staged to reflect badly on squabbles of that sort? Who can tell whether Gloucester’s luminously angry outburst—“under my feet I’ll stamp thy cardinal’s hat, in spite of Pope or dignities of the church”— was put into the play to appeal to playgoers’ antipapal sentiment or just to drive the plot? Did the duke’s indignation reflect that of the playwright? We shall never know, yet we cannot rule out the possibility that the latter was surprised—in the theater and in the realm—by his plays’ prelates and by their Jacobethan counterparts offstage, by how much hostility and how little humility those “heavenly spirits” exhibited.25 At the end of his career, Shakespeare and collaborator John Fletcher staged Cardinal Wolsey’s last few years at the Court of King R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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Henry VIII. The result, All Is True, shows more sympathy for Wolsey than one might expect. Debates about which playwright was responsible for what scenes still flare, but at the very least, one can say that Shakespeare let stand the scenes showing Wolsey as an extravagant host (1.1), unjustly accused of having come between king and queen (2.4), and finally accepting his fate—“a poor fall’n man”—having failed to save his sovereign from “spleeny” heretics (3.2.99). The playwright perhaps declared a ceasefire after bullying Beaufort. Or did the challenge of composing history plays during acrimonious Jacobethan discussions of the concentration and proposed decentralization of authority in the religion around Shakespeare incline him to monitor the man rather than attack the office? We will not have an answer at the end of this chapter, but we will have repossessed enough of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century context to see how Shakespeare’s highly placed prelates fit into his time.

B i s hop s : “ W h e at” and “Chaff” “Let others be bishops,” Thomas Sampson wrote at the very start of Elizabeth’s reign. “I will either undertake the office of preacher or none at all.”26 And twenty-five years later, he confided to Anthony Gilby, who also shied from episcopal office on his return from exile in 1558, that religiously reformed colleagues who had accepted their appointments as the new queen’s first bishops had yet to solve the established church’s knottiest problems. Sampson had no quick fix, no “program,” yet the leadership of the church seemed to have resisted even the most obvious improvements. From the 1560s into the 1580s, the bishops and their queen declined to dispose of “dumb remnants of idolatry” and were disinclined to listen to “meete men”— presumably, like Gilby and Sampson—who might have pried England from what remained of “papistry.”27 The refugees-turned-bishops had hoped for better. They accepted appointments, resolving to be vastly different from the “oily, shaven, portly hypocrites” whose places they had taken. “For we require our bishops to be pastors,” John Jewel explained before he was named to {  98  } 

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the see of Salisbury; his “we” expected religiously reformed bishops to “employ their leisure attending the flock of Christ.”28 Yet that expectation is something of an abstraction; if their critics can be trusted, the bishops had a hard time translating it into policy or consistent practice. The queen helped them downsize, requiring that her more affluent new bishops forfeit all but one of their country estates. Perhaps the results were fewer temptations and higher standards. Jewel preferred to think so. One wonders what he thought of John Scory, his colleague in exile and bishop of Hereford, who was accused of extortion—selling influence and buying favors.29 Arriving in London, Shakespeare might have heard about scandals such as Scory’s, called “merchandizing.” In 1594, at St. Paul’s Cross, John Howson, Elizabeth’s chaplain, preached against bishops’ enterprise. “The merchant buyeth not his wares, but with the hope to sell them at a better price. . . . Can we hope that anie man should buy a bishopricke, and not sell the prebends, the dignities, and those benefices belonging to it? No,” Howson answered, not naming offenders. He lamented that many “Christians are degenerated into cunning politicians” when, promoted to high office, they set out to make a profit, “every man for his own commodity.” Jesus’s “greatest miracle,” Howson noted, was not the resurrection of Lazarus but the cleansing of the temple. The profiteers of that time—if not the clerical entrepreneurs of the sixteenth century—thereby ascertained “how odious this sinne is of prophaning the church of God with buying and selling.” Howson’s sermon stopped sniping at pay-to-play bishops, however, and suddenly turned into a call for greater supervision of lay patrons who, for their “commodity,” “rob and spoyle” the curates and churches.30 Howson, therefore, exposed little more in the 1590s than had Edwin Sandys as bishop of London in the 1580s. Sandys hoped for a clampdown on greedy patrons who “gape for gains [and] go plainely to work with Judas.” Both Howson and Sandys must have known that if the highest bidders for benefices were to be rejected, authorities of the established church would have to do more than complain.31 Were they likely to do so? To John Chardon of Exeter, the answer was obvious, because he believed that episcopal and lay patrons were cut from the same crude cloth. The year before he was named bishop of Down R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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and Connor in Ireland, he proposed a radical solution. Whereas the queen ventured only to confiscate a few episcopal estates, Chardon suggested “clipping and clean taking away” all other sources of revenues and assigning “pettie pensions” to bishops, which might incline them to punish mercenary lay patrons more severely.32 Howson was having none of that. Bishops’ frugality was one thing, penury quite another. Pious preaching about the latter was ludicrous, because religious authority was “disarmed,” he said, “without just maintenance.” If bishops were to stand up to the laity and refuse to institute “unmeete” candidates for ecclesiastical livings, episcopal authority must be enhanced. Bishops must be “armed” with more than “pettie pensions” and small patches of territory. Furthermore, Howson maintained that “to take away the use of good things because they be abused” was unscriptural and silly. Jesus tossed the moneylenders and “merchandizing” from the temple, but he did not “pull [it] down.” He did not “persuade magistrates to turn it to prophane uses.” Strident, sweeping indictments of bishops’ commercial acuity and stewardship no doubt arrested attention, yet they served no good purpose. Error and malice “carrieth your eye to the chaffe only,” Howson told bishops’ more venomous critics. “You might as easily perceive the wheat if you were disposed.”33 But historians as well as Jacobethan reformists have had a hard time perceiving “the wheat.” Historians have an excuse; they are centuries removed from the bishops’ efforts, and records of such that survive are less than satisfactory. And sifting them has not yet yielded a categorically positive picture of episcopal virtues and virtuosity. Relics of good intentions are within reach. In 1593, for example, Lancelot Andrewes challenged fellow bishops to be vigilant (attendite). He said he was only echoing the apostle Paul’s directives issued long before the Christian church had acquired wealth or influence (Acts 28:20). That stark imperative was worth repeating, Andrewes apparently estimated, because the church’s “winnings”—endowments, lands, and revenues—made vigilance all the more necessary. The point of his challenge and lecture was not to protect clerical possessions but to ensure that highly placed prelates not be tempted to behave immodestly by their institution’s intoxicatingly advantageous position.34 {  100  } 

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We have no evidence that Andrewes’s sermon, delivered in Convocation, hit a nerve and affected the deliberations that followed. Bishops left no transcripts of what was discussed that year. Quite the contrary; reformist critics inferred from their conduct thereafter— as before—that bishops and their deputies attended more to maintenance and “merchandizing” than to major change. Conformists did stress the importance of keeping the realm’s pastors close to their own pulpits (for the government frowned on itinerants), but they also rejected proposals to end pluralism in their dioceses. Andrewes’s eloquent attendite did little to appease the critics who thought that most bishops feigned devotion to the congregations in their care. Some scolds could be courteous; a petition that found its way into John Harrington’s commonplace book told the bishop of Peterborough that he had grown remote.35 The petition seems polite alongside Eusebius Paget’s complaint that the bishop of Exeter spent more time with his horses than in his churches and that “he preacheth very seldome.” Kennels and stables belong with the lords of the realm’s manors; the realm’s “lordly bishops,” Paget continued, hardly know “when to move parishioners to mourning [or] thanksgiving.”36 Unfair? Some Jacobethan bishops may have become distant, yet others knew that pulpits were the logical places for them, their deputies, and their apologists to answer the loudest reformists. George Paule, comptroller of John Whitgift’s episcopal household in Worcester and Canterbury, reported that, “unless extraordinary business hindered him,” Whitgift preached every Sabbath, and, after a short period of adjustment to his new job, “no Sunday escaped him in Kent” while he was archbishop.37 Dutiful retainers-turned-biographers were known to exaggerate, of course, especially when their subjects’ most abrasive critics deliberately overlooked the pastor in the prelate. Yet Tobie Matthew’s diary lists nearly thirteen hundred sermons that he delivered as bishop of Durham and archbishop of York between 1595 and 1622. Laypersons living close to cathedrals and episcopal residences were likelier to come across their bishops in local pulpits, although, during the 1590s, visitations were occasions for confirmations and consecrations, so that bishops were more often on the circuit, and, historians say, their sermons were “common occurrence[s].”38 R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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It is a safe bet that their sermons commended conformity and left enforcement of the same to diocesan courts. When the results disappointed bishops, they typically appealed to their archbishops or the queen’s Council to authorize ecclesiastical commissions, and—once fit commissioners were appointed—the bishops looked forward to “the ordering and determining of all discords and dissentions.”39 Government’s commissioners “order[ed] and determine[d]” more effectively, one supposes, inasmuch as they were empowered to incarcerate—as well as to depose and suspend—personnel. Diocesan commissions were less well equipped to address acute crises, yet they were useful all the same. Take the appeal of Thomas Bilson, who had been a commissioner in Hampshire before he was named bishop of Worcester in April 1596. Queen Elizabeth approved his nomination in May, he was consecrated in June, and in July the new bishop wrote Cecil about the need for a diocesan commission. Worcester was “as dangerous as any place that I know,” Bilson unburdened; dozens of prominent recusants welcomed “wanderers” who countenanced disobedience. Moreover, particularly around Warwickshire, insolent reformists parried every suggestion that the ministry of the established churches was sufficiently reformed and urged laymen to stay away from worship when conformist clergy presided. Harassed by reformists and Catholic recusants alike, Bilson reported that “ordinary authority” was too “weak to do any good on either sort.” “Excommunication [was] the only bridle the law yieldeth to a bishop,” and “either side utterly despis[es] that course of correction.”40 The ineffectiveness of bishops’ “only bridle” in the diocese where Shakespeare’s family lived at the time indicates that their critics had done appreciable damage, tellingly exposed “the chaffe,” and, in places, “utterly” sabotaged episcopal authority. For it must have been easier to justify disregarding censures of prelates believed to be inordinately, if not exclusively, interested in advancing their careers—and uninterested in improving their ministry. Bilson spent only a year in Worcester. He left to become bishop of Winchester, a more prestigious, much wealthier see. Even when bishops’ tenures were far longer and when their dedication to circulating among—and to supervising—their clergy was evident, however, laymen who were {  102  } 

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listening to reformist critics grew suspicious. Were bishops on circuit devoted to disciplining the residually Catholic and to inspiring the religiously indifferent? Or were they out to collect fees and fines? Were visitations, inspections, citations, excommunications, absolutions, and sermons economically motivated? Anthony Harison, who spent his career in service to successive bishops of Norwich, rhymed his reformist answer: reformation “pretended[;] money intended, nothing is amended, but God is offended, and so the play is ended.”41 There is nothing on bishops quite as barbed as Harison’s ditty in Shakespeare’s plays.42 Beaufort of Winchester, Gloucester’s nemesis, is the only English bishop standing squarely in the line of reformist fire. Wolsey escapes relatively unscathed, we discovered, and Bishop John Morton of Ely, later archbishop of Canterbury, cardinal, and chancellor, who figured prominently in the coups that Shakespeare dramatized, is only awarded a bit part in Richard III. Morton survived several regime changes, choreographing from exile the one that handed the Crown to Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather. Morton was rewarded with promotions. Thomas More plugged the prelate-politician’s noble character and cunning in his history of the reign and ruin of Henry’s predecessor, King Richard III, which—literary historians agree—Shakespeare read, but without following More’s lead; instead, the playwright clips Morton’s career and only mentions that remarkably durable bishop-cardinal-chancellor’s skill cultivating strawberries.43 That the more epic dimensions of Morton’s participation in political history failed to make it onstage is something of a mystery. Certainly a sly playwright would have managed more if he had either condoned or condemned hierarchical authority and prelates’ political activities in England’s Catholic or reformed churches. Did anxieties about official censorship cause Shakespeare to suppress strongly held views about church authority? Certainly, his investments of time and money in theatrical ventures ought to have made him risk-averse or, as Katherine Duncan-Jones surmises, “determined to please the widest possible audience.”44 Borrowing Jeffrey Knapp’s splendid term, I think it wise to suggest that Shakespeare kept his plays “extraclerical,” avoiding both clericalism and anticlericalism.45 R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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But, around Shakespeare, playgoers did take sides. At times, what Felicity Heal now calls “the censoriousness of lay society” was epidemic. Reformists bitterly criticized their bishops: “Any form of display was liable to attract accusations of greed and ambition.” Display, nonetheless, was part of highly placed prelates’ responsibilities for hospitality. Royal guests expected to be entertained—royally. Bishops’ critics forgot to factor that political influence came at a price, that a bishop’s authority within his diocese—and in his monarch’s presence—was quickly and irreparably “undermined by his failure to sustain affability.”46 Historians now tend to award high marks for responsible stewardship to the Jacobethan church’s authorities—bishops sharing credit with other diocesan officials, particularly vicars-general and episcopal secretaries. And, as Patrick Collinson reminds us, the selection of reliable subordinates was a test of competent leadership. Delegation was not dereliction of duty. Done well, it was quite the contrary.47 Edward Stanhope, for example, was appointed by John Aylmer and served three subsequent bishops, doggedly monitoring the way worship was conducted in London. Conformists would presumably have replaced “doggedly” with “dutifully,” whereas Aylmer’s reformist critics and the preachers he (and Stanhope) prosecuted likely would have draped the term with damning pejoratives. For Aylmer’s man strenuously objected when he discovered that sacraments at St. Botolph’s, Aldgate, were solemnized contra formam canonum et constitutorum ecclesiasticorum. Stanhope is an excellent testament to both Aylmer’s conformist obsessions and administrative gifts.48 Kenneth Fincham reviewed the squadrons of Jacobethan Stanhopes, the ranks of bishops and vicars-general, and concluded, as did Collinson, that diocesan executives generally were “judicious,” searching diligently for information on parish incumbents’ qualifications and for strategies to retrain them when necessary.49 For the last twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign, John Whitgift presided, as archbishop of Canterbury and a member of the queen’s Council, over the established church’s reflections on its staff and service. We do not know how successful he was before then, during his tenure in Worcester from 1577 to 1583. Whitgift was in Stratford {  104  } 

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hunting for Catholic recusants in the autumn of his initial year but found only a few further north, in Warwick.50 An admittedly imperfect yet useful idea of the scale of predicaments facing him can be teased from figures collected twenty years after he departed. By then, Worcester registered roughly the same number of communicants as did the diocese of Peterborough, but three times as many recusants. Worcester counted one thousand fewer communicants than did the diocese of Gloucester, yet more than four times as many recusants.51 Reformist recusants around Warwick may have given Whitgift more trouble than Catholic counterparts in the countryside, whose resistance amounted to little more than bedding for expatriate Jesuits riding through the diocese. But reformists enjoyed the patronage of the influential Dudley brothers, Earls of Leicester and Warwick, and a few were rumored to be “ready to ronne headlong into any looseness.”52 Whitgift took precautions; his visitation articles probed for the clerical partisans of local or parish autonomy who complained about the distribution of authority in the established church and who customized liturgies “without controlment of any superior.”53 The bishop of Worcester earned a reputation for tenacity. Conformist colleagues trusted him to cope creatively with cagey critics in pulpits and pews. Queen and Council agreed with one admirer, Matthew Hutton, who concluded that Whitgift was ready to assume, “without faynting,” the “verie heavie and great burden” of an archiepiscopal see.54

Wh i tg i ft “ W i thout Faynti ng ” Even before John Whitgift went to Worcester, he was running with the hounds. As master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and vice-chancellor of the university, he led a pack of conformist colleagues against William Fulke and other dissident college fellows who would have had the queen and Council “labor speedily to reduce our English church as nigh as may be to the forme and patterne of the apostles’ church.”55 In the early 1570s, Thomas Cartwright was Whitgift’s principal target. Their pamphlet skirmishes lasted for years, even after the vice-chancellor had chased Cartwright from Cambridge. The latter demanded that the R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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liturgies of the reformed church in England be purged of every gesture and all apparel that looked Catholic. Whitgift replied that some things associated with Catholicism could be “converted to the honour of the true God.”56 As for episcopacy, no conversion was necessary, he emphasized; bishops were not papist. Episcopacy was not a Roman Catholic invention but an early Christian organizational option. Post-resurrection communities, adjusting to circumstances, experimented with administrative practices. So biblical references to congregational participation in conferences hardly represented the one “forme or patterne” that had to be implemented in every age. Conformists agreed with Whitgift that Cartwright and reformists had misread their Bible, mistaking their “own fancies . . . for principles and groundes” and presuming an insurmountable scriptural obstacle to the continued existence of episcopacy in England.57 In England, unlike in first-century Palestine or second-century Rome and Corinth, magistrates “upholdeth” the Christian church. There was no reason, in Whitgift’s opinion, why authority in the English church should not be concentrated and exercised by sensible officials who appreciated the changes as opportunities to collaborate with government for meaningful religious reform. Bishops may not have loomed large in the Bible’s record of the new faith’s first, vital struggles for survival, yet bishops, cathedral chapters, diocesan executives, and diocesan “controlment” were critical if the reformed faith were to thrive. Whitgift believed that reformists were unrealistic to think otherwise, although an anonymous pamphleteer charged that he fashioned his beliefs and his criticism of reformist exegesis to worm his way into a higher ecclesiastical office. Whitgift was malicious and ambitious; he contrived specious reasons to give nonconformists a quick send-off, according to this one livid scribe, who still seemed to hope that Whitgift’s conformist colleagues (maybe the queen as well) would see through his accusations and his self-serving, flawed interpretations of scripture to discover that “malice is a most subtill sophister.”58 Apparently they did not; Whitgift was posted to Worcester in 1577. As a signing bonus of sorts, he recovered several episcopal estates that his predecessors had forfeited. He was allowed to nominate {  106  } 

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to prebends in the cathedral church that were in the queen’s gift. Worcester was his first see; still, he was evidently important to the government. He was among the few bishops summoned to deal with the discontent in Parliament during Grindal’s disgrace. Two of those few, Edwin Sandys and John Aylmer, seemed likelier candidates to succeed Grindal than did Whitgift. In the early 1580s, Elizabeth counted on Sandys, archbishop of York, to silence the realm’s “young ministers grow[n] madd” and to keep their friends in the Commons from pressing for further reform of the church. He countered their criticisms of the ministry and gave the arguments for a modicum of pluralism in the church a startling intelligibility. But Sandys was tainted by scandal; accusations of adultery hardly improved his chances for promotion.59 Aylmer, bishop of London, occasionally filled in for Grindal during Convocation. He was respected at Court, although suspected of the sort of severity that hindered clerical recruitment. William Cecil thought that Aylmer’s obsessive concern with nonconformity “forestauleth many good men.” The religiously reformed moderates around London may have figured that shifting the bishop of London to Lambeth and Canterbury would stir to schism or insurrection coreligionists who already resented him for having “gravell[ed] their consciences” and for having required them, John Field scowled, “to stick in the same filth that he doth of superstitious ceremonies.”60 Whitgift in Worcester was more diplomatic than Aylmer had been in London. Perhaps for the benefit of the reformists’ powerful Warwickshire patrons, he expressed remorse for his harsh words against Cartwright.61 But Whitgift’s patience with dissidents remained razor-thin. He believed that their nonconformity—even if expressed exclusively in their opposition to the Prayer Book’s rubrics—set them “against the whole order, state, and government of this churche of England.” “In effect,” he said, they “undermine[d] it all.” Whitgift had no misgivings about stopping them upon succeeding Grindal in 1583 and, in 1586, upon becoming the first prelate named to the queen’s Council.62 William Shakespeare was then in Stratford, starting a family in the diocese that Whitgift left for Canterbury. Six months before the new R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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archbishop delivered a sermon now thought to have set the agenda for his pontificate, Shakespeare’s first daughter was born, so it is hard to imagine that he paid much attention to what the new archbishop of Canterbury said at St. Paul’s Cross. But it is equally hard to imagine that Shakespeare knew nothing of the reasons why his bishop, Whitgift of Worcester, had been called to Canterbury and that he heard nothing about the inventory of conformists’ enemies that the promoted prelate had composed and disclosed in that sermon. “Murmerers and complainers” were more than phantom foes. They posed a great danger to the order of the established church and to the queen’s regime. “Papists, anabaptists and our wayward and conceited persons” (the last referring to relentless reformists) ought to be “put in remembrance to . . . obey the magistrates,” Whitgift warned. He did not expect that these enemies of order would listen to the Bible’s “exhortations to obedience,” which he recycled in his sermon. To him, the ardent reformists seemed intent on “despis[ing]” authority. As for Catholics, they foolishly believed that the only authority worth obeying was a faraway, covetous bishop who boasted of being God’s sole vicar on earth.63 Whitgift was most worried by reformists. During his pamphlet war with Thomas Cartwright, he had already contested their claims that episcopacy—“superioritie” in their ministry—was unchristian, but reformists continued to express their mistrust of diocesan authority in less than subtle ways. They asked to have at least six local pastors present when bishops examined and ordained new ministers to voice their disapproval, should any would-be ministers prove offensive, and to veto those nominees.64 Whitgift’s sermon at St. Paul’s did not stop to answer proposals of that kind or general complaints, although it did formulate a counter-complaint: “For slight causes [the reformists] break the peace of the church,” Whitgift said, and they “have many favourers and followers . . . because they colour their doings . . . with the titles of faith and perfection.” The reformists’ hostility to high-ranking clergy seemed pious to many; their objections to the established authorities’ insistence on conformity were taken by sympathizers as a cri de coeur. Whitgift closed his sermon with an appeal for reserve, perhaps while he was already devising, in that winter of 1583, new ways to harrass the church’s more outspoken critics.65 {  108  } 

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To Dudley Fenner, who returned to England during Grindal’s pontificate and left under duress early in Whitgift’s, reserve was tantamount to disobeying a divine directive to “complayne of evilles, fallen out in the church.” Its official liturgy was an example of how far shy of God’s purposes the realm’s reformed church had stalled. Its Prayer Book was fouled by the very mention of priests, Edward Dering argued, because the wording turned communion into “a popish sacrifice.” Fenner and Dering likened themselves to Hebrew prophets called to warn of God’s wrath, should authorities silence them.66 Yet silence, to Sandys and to most other bishops from the late 1570s, seemed necessary for “the peace of the church.” In the 1580s, they reputedly admired what historian Michael Questier describes as Whitgift’s “extremely efficient,” intimidating interrogations and suspensions.67 Technically, the new archbishop and his suffragans—with his and their commissioners—borrowed powers that Parliament and Convocation had given to the Crown fifty years before—specifically, powers to root out “errors, heresies, and schisms.” The government, in other words, “upholdeth” the church by delegating power to purge it of unwanted elements. Commissioners summoned suspected nonconformists, demanding that they subscribe to the current organization of the established church, adopt prescribed Prayer Book liturgies, and become “dutyfull and obedient” subjects who “give over” the conceit that they know more than—and better than—their bishops. If summoned pastors refused, they were suspended. They were deprived of their benefices if they persisted. Reformists’ lawyerly friends argued that the bishops’ commissions had no jurisdiction, because benefices were treated as property in common law. Deprivations, they alleged, preempted trials by jury, which would give suspects a chance to answer their accusers. But suspicion was enough to start proceedings against nonconformists—enough, that is, for Whitgift, Bancroft, Aylmer, and many other bishops eager to trawl for dissidents in their dioceses.68 A few nonconformists quit. Some, like Fenner, simply quit the realm and left to preach on the Continent. Others hired on as lecturers, delivering sermons without administering the sacraments and thereby giving bishops and their conformist commissioners what the R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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reformists said they had wanted all along—“communion[s] without teaching and preaching.”69 An  irony, in certain instances, was that lecturers were less well supervised than incumbents and therefore relatively free to criticize the bishops in whose honor a few of those lectureships were founded and funded.70 Yet, on the whole, reformists of all stripes probably agreed that what Nicholas Fant, Walsingham’s secretary, described as the “bitterness” and “vehemency” of Whitgift’s first sermon at St. Paul’s Cross as archbishop was promptly reflected in policy once commissioners started sifting the ministry.71 Reservations about Whitgift’s tactics were expressed in high places. William Cecil insinuated that the archbishop’s proceedings were comparable to the Catholics’ Inquisition in Spain. Whitgift marveled that his colleagues in government, who professed to be for peace and “unitie in religion,” could argue against the commissioners’ bridling “contentious,” “audacious,” “rash,” “ignorant” pastors. Was Cecil unaware that complaints of “meanly qualify’d” dissidents constituted an early sign that heresy was ascendant? According to Whitgift, anyone daring to compare the “greate and weightie considerations” disposing him to silence unyielding reformists with Roman Catholics’ ruthless suppression of all religious reform spoke seditiously as well as falsely.72 But precisely that comparison—Cecil’s insinuation—was taken as irrefutable by some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians who referred to “the Whitgift tyranny” while writing to defend the liberalism of their own age, which owed much, they imagined, to  the freedoms Jacobethan reformists were defending against the archbishop.73 Yet, for his part, Whitgift, as we learned, identified those freedoms as great dangers to the peace of his church and realm. The “impugners of the [Prayer B]ook” were cursing every properly constituted authority—parish, diocesan, and court—that tried to enforce established rubrics, he said, adding that the dissidents’ defiance of their bishops’ commissions was merely the most conspicuous, current expression of a profound antipathy to all authority and order.74 He proposed as much during the 1570s and reintroduced that “greate and weightie consideration” to give his campaign against nonconformists irresistible momentum in the next decades. He also stuck to {  110  } 

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his line, because he observed that his critics stuck to theirs. “Continuallie” and with verve, they agitated to purge reformed religion of imperfections that could never be effaced as long as churches were populated with imperfect subjects, clerical and lay.75 The conformists neither did nor would trivialize imperfections, he wrote elsewhere, and they would bend every effort to keep miscreants from the ministry. And one result of their intolerance of those corrupt practices that could be eliminated (and of their understanding of the flaws or imperfections that were endemic to managerial elites) was that conformist diocesan authorities enjoyed the support of “clergie of account for learning, yeares, stedenesse, wisdom, religion, and honestie.” Whitgift boasted that the best were with him. Only twelve “meanelie qualifyed” ministers, twelve of the one hundred twenty-eight incumbents in his diocese, refused to conform in 1584.76 Whitgift set the statistics to minimize the importance of resistance. Maybe the numbers indicate that reformists in the 1580s gradually learned “to lay off the kind of clandestine activity which had provoked persecutions,” as Patrick Collinson now says, and “to keep their heads down” and await the death of “their deeply unsympathetic queen.”77 In any event, Whitgift was given credit for having pretty much picked off clerical malcontents. To one admirer, he was a sentinel (excubitor) who saved the churches from the kinds of quarrels that would otherwise have undone the English reformation.78 Quite a tribute! But, according to reformists, the salvation to which it alluded left many parishes without effective preaching. The prospect of so many vacancies prompted Giles Wigginton, pastor in Sedburgh in Yorkshire, to propose an alternative to Whitgift’s commissions, interrogations, coerced self-incriminations, and deprivations. Wigginton’s notion was simply to nudge the realm’s curates to speak more kindly about their bishops. Whitgift, excubitor, knew that he was being mocked, and Sedburgh was well aware of its pastor’s opinion that “prelacye” was the “maine piller of pestilence in the church of God and commonwealth.”79 Sandys, then archbishop of York, was alerted, but the attempt to muzzle Wigginton was thwarted because William Cecil befriended the scurrilous critic.80 For his part, Wigginton remained resolutely indiscreet or, as one conformist said, R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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simply “resolute.”81 Still, Whitgift was relentless and succeeded in having the Sedburgh pastor deprived of his pulpit. The archbishop grew confident that—despite dissidents cleverly “colour[ing] their doings” as reverence and their bishops as cruel tyrants, the queen’s Council—including William Cecil—was coming to understand that the maligned conformists were not “such men as [Wigginton and his friends] wold make us.”82 To the contrary, conformists styled themselves as “well-affected men” and insisted that it was “no small slander” for “factiouse preachers” to say otherwise, to suggest, for instance, that the government’s appreciation of bishops was making them “pompous” as well as wealthy.83 Moderate reformist critics were less concerned with their bishops’ purses and properties than with empty pulpits and underserved parishes. Their sympathies were almost certainly with the seven Ely preachers, startled by their suspensions. They appealed to Whitgift, protesting that they were well known in their diocese for having disciplined renegade parishioners. They recalled having preached separatists back into their parish churches. Given such successes, their objections to details in the Prayer Book hardly constituted sufficient reason to silence them.84 William Perkins, in nearby Cambridge, agreed. He argued that versatile, if somewhat overly scrupulous, preaching pastors were being dismissed too cavalierly. They had been ordained “to redeem and win soules,” he explained; hence, “they must preach.” There were already too few conscientious preachers—“one of a thousand,” he exaggerated—and the silence in so many pulpits, broken only by anguished appeals of deprived preachers to be taken back, showed how close England was to ecclesiasticide.85 Cambridge and Perkins bore watching. Accounts of the established church’s imperfections and of its commissions’ cruelties were the steady diet of students training for the ministry at certain colleges. The stories told there, Whitgift knew from firsthand experience, were “so notoriouslie untrue that they nedeth no confutation.”86 He told his longtime associate Richard Cosin to keep college officials on a short leash. Cosin was with him in Worcester, where, as vicar-general, he presided over the bishop’s consistory court, resolving small feuds {  112  } 

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before they grew into gargantuan problems. Both Cosin and the court kept the see peaceful—and solvent. Tolerance for the tedious sometimes served him well, as when objections to counting tamed pigeons in the tithe were listed at length, yet the serious usually eclipsed the silly—or what appears, from a distance, to have been the relatively inconsequential—and Cosin, it seems, performed admirably.87 For Whitgift brought Cosin to Canterbury, where the latter, defending those controversial commissions composed to interrogate pastors and to guarantee conformity, was soon widely known for sinking his talons into Whitgift’s critics. Attorney James Morrice said he had forwarded “a fryndlie caveat and covert admonition,” only to have Cosin “publikclie” and “greatlie abuse” him.88 Morrice and fellow reformists pointed out that there was nothing like the English bishops’ commissions and commissioners in the reformed churches on the Continent. Yet neither Whitgift nor his partisans, notably Cosin and Richard Bancroft, took observations of the sort as serious objections. If the Swiss, German, or French reformed churches did away with diocesan educators and enforcers—and even with their bishops—all the worse for them! But in England the ecclesiastical commissioners and other clerical executives connected with the kingdom’s cathedrals were and would remain “chiefe and principall ornaments of th[e] realme.”89 It was best to let England be led by English circumstance, Bancroft said, sharing Whitgift’s low opinion of other reformed experiments with the redistribution of religious authority. To both prelates, parish consistories and regional synods abroad looked like long strides toward “anabaptistry.”90 Precisely that perception made the religious independence of the refugee churches in London rather precarious. At the time, Shakespeare was living among the refugees—he lodged with the Mountjoys and remained friends with Richard Field, as we have learned—so he may have detected discomfort among French, Flemish, and Dutch “strangers.” He may also have ascertained that, resisting assimilation, they continued to conduct their affairs in ways that conformist bishops believed to be unbecoming. The Dutch, for example, sent two lay elders to the Continent to interview candidates and select a senior pastor. The lay delegates had complete authority (met volle macht) to R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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make a choice and to negotiate the nominee’s release from his parish.91 Whitgift and Bancroft, disparaging Calvinist practices abroad, apparently gave the refugees pause, however, for when the French and Dutch quarreled over the use of a church where they worshipped separately, they were advised not to appeal to their English coreligionists for arbitration. Why call attention to the deliberations and disagreements in their respective consistories that the English conformists thought so “odieuses”?92 Why provide another conspicuous target (alongside implacable, native nonconformists who claimed they were only imitating colleagues’ practices on the Continent) for what Jacqueline Rose calls “authoritarian conformism”?93 Oddly, authoritarian conformists feared lay authoritarianism. They thought parish consistories were destabilizing, insofar as some pastor or layperson would come forward sooner or later aspiring to be a pope in his presbytery. Reformists who did not think that prospect likely were imprudent, unrealistic, or treacherously deceitful, according to their conformist critics, whose fears rested on what seemed to them to be reformists’ confidence or conviction that they could run their realm’s reformation “a great deale better than the grave fathers of this land.”94 Those “grave fathers” were vilified during the 1580s; in return, they devised punitive sanctions, as we have seen, and claimed that bishops (with their commissions) were the government’s basic bulwark against the kind of religious diversity that drives kingdoms to chaos. Whitgift argued from circumstance and from royal sovereignty that episcopacy was reformed, prudent, and well worth protecting from obstreperous critics. But in the 1590s conformists’ attitudes “hardened.” Their adversaries’ leading patrons at Court were dead, so apologists for jure divino episcopacy asserted more openly that their bishops’ church was accurately and apostolically reformed—whereas reformed churches on the Continent (and the refugees’ churches in England) were not. True, the banter in London’s theater districts— Bankside and Blackfriars or north of the walls in Shoreditch—was octaves away from the arguments behind such assertions, but the playwrights and playgoers presumably knew something about what

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was at stake in controversies about religious authority, controversies about “controlment” in the religion around Shakespeare.95

“ Con t rol me n t” and Confor m i ty The “grave fathers,” to whom Adam Hill referred, fired off rounds of invective when their prerogatives and powers to control subordinates were challenged. Arguments about superiority in the ministry continued well into the seventeenth century. The sermon that George Downame preached at Lambeth in 1608 chronicles his exposure to and participation in the controversy, giving us a good look at shifting positions. While studying at Cambridge twenty years earlier, Downame had been unimpressed with officials’ justifications for episcopacy. Debates about distributing authority in the established church, to his mind, yielded no sturdy conclusions about governance. Nonetheless, once he was in the ministry, he discovered how useful it was to have diocesan officials ready to resolve “parishionall” problems and to correct the “strange” statements about liturgy and doctrine he was hearing from a few fellow ministers. Not much could be done to regulate itinerant preaching or to keep babblers from invading, overrunning, and ruining the settled ministry if bishops, the top brass, had not been authorized to maintain order in their dioceses.96 They also set standards for basic social services; the bishop of London supervised health care delivery and formulated a code of conduct for midwives.97 No surprise, therefore, that Downame, attentive to the discussions of superiority in ministry even before he became a bishop in 1616, came to endorse the prevailing diocesan administration of the established church. Then, sometime before King James succeeded Queen Elizabeth, Downame remembered that one of his Cambridge mentors, Richard Greenham, made a point of urging his students to test their preferences for presbytery or for episcopacy against the evidence left by the apostles and early church fathers. So Downame took another look at the issues related to diocesan organization, convinced that it was essential to be biblically and patristically correct as well as R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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managerially prudent and expeditious. He combed for passages that countenanced episcopacy and proved to himself that the very arrangements that critics considered medieval aberrations had been “generally and perpetually used in all Christian churches in the first three hundred yeeres after Christ,” when very little was done “without controlment,” without the bishops and their close associates authorizing local policies and appointments.98 “It is incredible,” Downame added later, that reformed Christians would consider “abolish[ing] that government ordained by Christ and his apostles.” Surely, then, it was also “impossible that a government not received from the apostles or ordained by the councils should at once be set up in all parts of the Christian world.”99 To Downame, the collapse of episcopacy in England (reformists “abolish[ing] the government ordained by Christ and his apostles”) was unthinkable because it had endured for so long “in all parts of the Christian world.” Yet reformist abolitionists countered with a contemporary—we might say, with an existential—concern, namely, that local autonomy was a precondition for “personal zeal in every parish” and that a palpable “falling away in religion” was then—and had long been—the sordid consequence of the “controlment” that Downame advocated.100 Downame never seems to have honored that cause-and-effect with a direct reply, although he intimated that bishops should find bureaucratic ways to revive religious enthusiasm: when the apostles Timothy and Titus “ceased from their peregrination” and settled as bishops of Ephesus and Crete, their “function and authoritie” were no longer “evangelisticall” but “episcopall.”101 Bishops’ reformist critics were quick to exaggerate the differences between evangelical (or “evangelisticall”) reformers and “episcopall” (institutionally protective and self-protective) conformists. John Udall thought that the latter’s reconfiguration of church “government ordained by Christ and his apostles” amounted to nothing but the debris from Roman Catholicism restacked. From a prison cell, Udall complained that his adversaries unjustly described dissidents of his stripe as traitors whenever they were “nott altogether dutyfull” to bishops, yet his unflattering remarks, which coupled Whitgift with grotesquely unreformed enemies of reformed religion on the {  116  } 

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Continent, were as far from “dutyfull” as the Marprelate libels were far from moderate.102 Udall and other martinists tirelessly groused about the self-​ indulgence and enviably comfortable accommodations of the realm’s best-positioned prelates. The conformists countered, sometimes patching colorful swatches of recent history into answers that dared reformists to find in Geneva and in other reformed communities across the Channel “clerolaicall consistoriens” who had ever shown the courage of England’s celebrated martyr-bishops of the 1550s.103 Conformists’ replies ordinarily repeated Downame’s line as well, arguing for episcopacy on two planes, biblical and practical. On the second, sociopolitical stability was the goal; on the first, it was conformity with what they took to be God’s original arrangement to keep churches from breaking into sects. If, as Udall asserted, the conformists built the case for episcopacy on “false foundations,” then the government of reformed churches in the realm, although politically practical, was objectionable, unbiblical, and “papisticall.” But if, as  conformists said, carpeting their platform with biblical and patristic citations as Downame did, apostles were “episcopall,” then the realm’s bishops—by virtue of that fact and pedigree—were biblical as well as eminently practical. It followed, then, that England, notwithstanding provisions made across the Channel for congregational autonomy, had scripturally and prudently laid out its established church as a “blend of civil and spiritual elements.”104 Shakespeare did not comment directly on the controversy, although his plays’ prelates may give us some sense of how the polemics were heard—if not also read—in the streets and stalls. His bishops tend to confirm what critics of episcopacy and conformity claimed. John Penry, for one, declared that bishops “usurped” their “unruly jurisdiction” and was promptly answered. Richard Bancroft and Thomas Bilson relied on the Bible’s authority and the queen’s prerogative, respectively, to counter talk of usurpation and, in effect although not in intent, to make Shakespeare’s Bishop (and Cardinal) Beaufort an exception to the rule—and to diocesan rule in the realm. Bilson’s point was that bishops’ “controlment” contributed to the Crown’s mission to safeguard the realm. And, following Bancroft, he retrofit R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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that role into the experiences of the faith’s first churches, which were threatened, he explained, by “the rashness and rudeness of many that are often ledde with affection than with discretion.” Bishops, Bilson said, were as old as Christianity; everything in parishes had been arranged “with [their] liking and assent.” But, he continued, diocesan executives were a tad experimental and tried delegating some authority to local leaders (elders or presbyters). It was an awful idea and was best dismissed as water under the bridge, Bilson recommended, because congregational officials could not then—or,  by implication, in early modern England—cope with the laity’s “rashness” and “rudeness.” History, as Bilson and Bancroft tidied it up, gave conformists all they needed to brace their bishops’ regime, for their history showed precisely how congregations in Christian antiquity had been “forced to reincorporate themselves into the church of some city by whose bishop the presbyters, living, were governed and, dying,” were replaced. To speak of bishops’ usurpation, therefore, only showed the speaker’s ignorance.105 Still, Penry had tapped into a vein of popular protest. “The lower orders,” historian J. A. Sharpe says, were often agitated. Price-fixing and enclosures prompted a number of local riots, eleven of which were serious enough to arrest “national” attention in the 1580s and 1590s. Alistair Fox detects a “major crisis of confidence” in the latter decade, citing as evidence patrons’ reluctance to spend money on opulently, compellingly encomiastic representations of the regime’s “virtues and aspirations.” Elizabeth knew of the disenchantment and distress. She thought courtiers were preparing “untymlouslie” for her funeral.106 There was no shortage of blame; profiteers, puritan agitators, landed gentry, and scheming recusants—even Spanish provocateurs— drew fire for one or another aggravating condition. And diocesan executives were not spared. John Whitgift consoled colleagues, remembering that “in all ages the lot of bishops [is] to be ill spoken of,” but Jacobethan prelates were particularly conspicuous casualties of what could be depicted as the nasty nineties.107 Measures that bishops and their surrogates took to suppress nonconformity and to control the ministry, as we saw, enjoyed some success, yet petitions and protests {  118  } 

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composed by conformists’ critics called attention to the dissension. “Whitgiftian policy was as responsible as any puritan excess,” Patrick Collinson estimates, “for destroying the comprehensiveness of the Church of England and its fully national character.”108 The queen did not see it that way. She forbade members of her Council from insulting their bishops. Francis Knollys, one of their most persistent critics at Court, went silent.109 King James obliged reformists by calling a conference within several months of his accession, but the results could only have encouraged his bishops; he let it be known that they and their jurisdiction were “agreeable” to their new sovereign—hence, quite secure.110 Whitgift lived to hear his king’s endorsement, but not long after. In 1604, Bancroft succeeded him as archbishop of Canterbury and continued to offer disincentives to nonconformity and to eject “Genevising” colleagues from the ministry. The casualties complained that their suspensions and ejections worked to the advantage of papists trying to reconvert parishioners in their absence, inasmuch as unpreaching pastors who replaced deprived dissidents demonstrated the carelessness of Calvinism. Whitgift, Bancroft, and their fellow bishops might just as well have invited the unreformed—wolves—into their dioceses and have given them license to devour their flocks. But the conformists had formulated an answer to that contention some years before the reigns changed. It was Whitgift’s (and became Bancroft’s) default position: an adequate number of acquiescent preachers remained in the vineyard after bishops’ commissioners pruned, both said; besides, pastors who “have not the guifte of utterance and audacitie to preach” could still be good guides, “well hable to catechize and privately to exhort,” able also to stave off any Roman Catholic resurgence.111 Acrimonious discussions about “superioritie” in the ministry, and charges related to bishops’ tactics in defending it, were common in reformed circles, but less so among Shakespeare’s closest acquaintances, although perceptive playgoers knew that storms of that sort would not soon blow over. They had been battering the realm for decades. The heavy weather helps us read Shakespeare’s bishops, but it hardly affected some of the controversial practices. In London parishes around the playwright, for instance, reviled surplices were R e l i g i o u s A u t h o r i t y   { 

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regularly laundered and, presumably, used despite the reformists’ harping on their terrible influence; “the weaker sorts” were said to “fall away from the truth” when they watched liturgists wearing Catholic gowns—but in most London churches, they watched.112 Reformists—again—blamed their bishops’ fondness for display. Surplices in the parish were only symptoms of a larger problem, the notion common in the established churches that clerical “dominion” should be dramatized. As for bishops, their “dominion” (their “popish lordlynes” and “great lyght”) appeared to reformist critics to have extinguished the “lytle fyre” they exhibited before their promotions turned them into prelates and turned them away from and against those colleagues who displayed fervor rather than finery—fervor for the evangelization of unreformed and partially reformed (“drowsy”) subjects and fervor for measures that would have further reformed the realm’s churches.113 Conformists’ critics, as we saw, were losing ground to authoritarian conformist apologists who were defending episcopacy, yet critics trusted—before and during Shakespeare’s time in London—that bishops’ “lordlynes” would eventually alienate commoners and members of the Commons. Deploring the fate of his deprived friends (“faythfull ministers”) in 1603, one dissident conjectured that bishops were “most afrayd” that Parliament would act on people’s complaints.114 Conformists worked fear into their rejoinders, claiming that reformists’ indignation was, in reality, envy and that the envious wanted to “pull down” bishops and to set themselves up as moral arbiters and religious tyrants—falling prey to the arrogance of power far more fatally, conformists claimed, than had the bishops they denounced.115 Reformist Robert Beale called such claims “opprobrious.” The conformist replies, he said, amounted to “angry words,” not answers.116 But, conceivably, playgoers at a performance of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure heard echoes of the conformists’ accusations. Angelo, the play’s puritan, is no angel. Given the chance, he strictly enforces an obsolete law to rein in the very lust that he—hypocrite—feels free to indulge. Peter Lake is quite right to object to interpretations that take the play exclusively as Shakespeare’s showdown with puritans and as an indictment of puritan pride, but it does include such a censure in {  120  } 

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its “implicit critique of a far wider body of contemporary assumptions and priorities” that kept surfacing during the exchanges among the polemicists and pamphleteers we encountered in this chapter.117 They were scorching exchanges. Conformists did more than circulate “angry words.” They persecuted puritan colleagues ready to redistribute power in the church, and some of the persecuted backed off. But others detonated charges of episcopal malpractice that left craters in what the conformist authorities wanted to present as a smooth operation, a perfectly, peacefully, and—above all—apostolically ordered established church. Reformists and conformists alike fired on the Catholics in the realm and in Rome, who, understandably, returned fire. Around Shakespeare, the rhetoric raged. The ways in which well-positioned prelates are portrayed in his plays suggest his awareness of the issues at stake, although not his stake in those issues. Cardinals, legates, and bishops in his drama dock the theater alongside the polemics of his time, yet, truth be told, he showed greater interest in religious personality than in religious polity. He could not have missed dissidents, bent to their oars, consistently scolding highly placed prelates for their attachments to “shaddowith things” and “the garish showes of this vain world.”118 From the late 1580s, however, criticism of liturgy, episcopacy, and conformity shared space in reformists’ literature with pietists’ insistence on the importance of self-scourging introspection, which seems to have arrested Shakespeare’s attention. Theater at the time could never have abandoned “garish showes,” yet something of an inward turn characterizes a few of Shakespeare’s plays. Huston Diehl notices, for example, that Hamlet “does not dazzle . . . with external spectacles but rather drives [playgoers] inward.”119 To be sure, around Shakespeare, the realm’s religious theorists continued to comment on how to restructure religious authority. (The specimens drawn from the polemical literature into this chapter constitute but a fraction of the output.) But many of the same theorists—and others—contributed to the torrent of devotional literature circulated to help Calvinists and Catholics alike restructure their desires.

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4 religious personality

“ C l e ari n g ” We have already come across Stephen Egerton preaching at Blackfriars. He was in that pulpit before Shakespeare came to London and still there in 1596 to oppose James Burbage’s plans to transform the great hall into a theater. He was preaching at Blackfriars when Shakespeare succeeded in 1608 where Burbage had failed. And, consistently, as the players and playgoers filled the great hall of the former priory, Egerton’s sermons sized up the realm’s reformed church and found it wanting. In 1589, he berated the queen’s religiously reformed counselors for failing to advocate aggressively further changes in liturgy and polity. But his timing was terrible. Conformists had the advantage. He said they were panderers hoping to perpetuate their privileged positions, flattering powerful patrons, by making out “the sins of great ones to be little ones.” But as Egerton lectured fellow reformists who had become determined conformists on their sins, cowardice, and corruption, he took what historians of late Tudor sonnets, drama, and devotional literature call an “inward turn.” He commended to

parishioners at Blackfriars a bruising regimen of self-incriminating introspection, which he described as “Christian clearing.”1 In the 1560s and 1570s, the “clearing” (or purification) that mattered most to reformists was more liturgical than psychological. They longed to have the “inventions of men,” which they associated with Catholicism, banned, to have the established church explicitly proscribe the gaudy clerical apparel and candles that attracted attention and affection away from God’s Word and its elaboration in reformist sermons. Surplices, saints’ images, kneeling before altars, and altars themselves were idolatries that Egerton deplored because they exhibited England’s ingratitude for all the earliest Tudor reformers had done. Those “idolatries” might appear petty to some—as adiaphora or excesses that could be tolerated without great consequence. To others, however, they were serious crimes. Egerton and the continental Calvinists he read, countenanced, and occasionally translated were among those “others.”2 But the criminal within every Christian was also a substantial concern for Egerton and his English friends. Even the avidly reformed in their parishes invariably forgot that they “oftentimes trip[ped] in particulars” because “nothing standeth betweene us and the actual committing of sin, but onely the want of occasion.” The remedy was to remember to “make reckoning” of the sin within, Egerton explained, and to fortify one’s resolve to resist its bidding. Alternatively, Christians could overlook the rot and pretend to be righteous; they could always point to someone whose shortfall was more glaring or whose behavior was deplorable. The villains in biblical texts were useful in that kind of reckoning. Who dared deny that “the most deere and faithfull [Jacobethan] servants of God . . . persuaded in the general grounds of their faith” were far more likely than the pharaohs of Egypt to receive eternal rewards? Egerton did. “We are farther from God than pharaoh,” he argued, “though we seeme to be never so neere unto him.” One had only to probe deeply to acknowledge that distance, and retrieving the knowledge (and uttering the acknowledgment) amounted to the first two steps toward rehabilitation.3 Excuses had to be evicted. Remorse took their place, developing into a “godly sorrow,” which, in Laurence Tomson’s version of {  124  } 

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Theodore Beza’s biblical commentary, was roughly the equivalent of a revenge prompted by love rather than hatred and fear.4 Ordinary sorrow was a fear-driven admission that one “trip[ped] in particulars” and had come to regret it. The fear at its start, fear of celestial punishments, prohibited a more vengeful inward turn and a bruising indictment of one’s wickedness. Admissions born of fear were little better than evasive tactics, exonerations disguised as inculpations that had been formulated to appease an angry God. Godly sorrow was very different. It was born of the realization that one persistently sinned against God’s mercy, and it matured as a repentance that became a style of life (rather than an act or resolve that ended when reparations were made), a lifestyle characterized by a never-ending, disorienting, comprehensive, and soterially effective “Christian clearing.”5 Richard Greenham believed that ordinary sorrow was insufficient. It might fit easily into Christians’ to-do lists and, therefore, be more palatable and practical. To encourage tepid regrets, however, was a mistake, Greenham said, illustrating his point with the story of a heretic who asked from the scaffold how he might be spared the torments of hell that awaited him. Told that repentance, then and there, could save him, he replied to his would-be consolers that if their “Christ [could be] so easily intreated . . . I defie him.” If the authorities had “dealt more bitterly” with the heretic, Greenham speculated—if they had required him to scrub his sins and “clear” his conscience— he might have complied.6 The third act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has an excellent specimen of insufficient and ineffective “clearing.” There King Claudius professes his “strong entent” to repent the “foul murder” of his brother and erstwhile sovereign, Hamlet senior, whose wife and crown he then possessed. Claudius, the ostensibly penitent usurper, pulls up well shy of a sincere, self-scorching remorse for his inordinate ambition and lust. Too fond of the fruits of his crime—power and intimacy— he  was unable to take stock of his offenses, to set aside his doubts (“may one be pardon’d”?), and to rest assured that God forgave the faithful (3.3.36–72). That kind of assurance was at the center of the fideism taught at Wittenberg, where—Shakespeare informs playgoers—the younger R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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Hamlet had been studying at the time of his father’s assassination. Whatever, if anything in particular, the playwright would have had his protagonist learn at Luther’s university, the usurper Claudius learns, to his disadvantage, what patrons at the play who had frequented London sermons already understood, that the stage penitent’s attempts to atone were lame: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below / Words without thoughts never to heaven goe” (3.3.97–98). Claudius is just plain impious and feigns penance, but Hamlet shows signs of the struggles that puritan preachers associated with the “clearing” they commended. Perhaps to some playgoers—and, as his part was scripted, to the protagonist himself—his extended premeditation looked like indecision. He seemed to be on permanent pause or caught in a calisthenics of self-questioning, punctuated by self-loathing that gained no ground. But reformist preacher George Gifford expected something of that sort from genuinely sorrowful sinners and called it “true fortitude.” Gifford lived long enough to attend the first performances of Hamlet, yet there is no evidence that he did. In his study, he conceded, he tinkered with the term: “fortitude” was conventionally defined as courage in the pursuit of honor and celebrity; the ancients, he explained, had expected revenge if one’s honor was offended or if one’s family was wronged. How else could the victimized prove their nobility? Gifford then made some changes and proposed that “true fortitude” endeavored to “subdue” the desires for glory or notoriety. Revenge was never in season, he insisted, adding that a “manhood that uttereth it selfe in private quarrel and bloody” vengeance dishonored religion and prolonged feuds. Yet “true fortitude” ought to overcome the “affections” fueling revenge. And such overcoming required an inward turn—precisely the maneuver reformists were urging on their parishioners to accomplish the “Christian clearing” that Egerton emphasized. “The strongest holds and the highest walls for this noble fortitude to scale and win are in a man’s own minde,” Gifford said, sounding as if he could have been commenting on Hamlet’s bouts of self-analysis. Or, more likely, Gifford’s (and other reformists’) recipes for the religious personality— the drama they thought essential for a restructuring of Christians’ desires—got embedded somehow in Shakespeare’s play.7 {  126  } 

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Or did playgoers see Hamlet’s persistent assaults on his own irresolution as an elaborate dramatization of the introspection exhibited in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays? As James Shapiro notices, there was just then “a rush to translate Montaigne.” The essay as a literary form had “captured a mind at work as never before.” And self-analysis took off, especially after William Cornwallis, “the first Englishman to follow in Montaigne’s footsteps,” instantly acquired a formidable reputation in 1600; his essays sold remarkably well because “conditions were ripe” for self-exploration, conditions from which Shapiro fashions a “new sensibility” that supposedly disposed Shakespeare to experiment with a set of soliloquies onstage and to emphasize Hamlet’s “loss of bearings.”8 Arguably, Shapiro’s masterful reconstruction of a single year in the playwright’s life, the year before Hamlet was first performed, packs too many critical disclosures and departures into 1599. But his argument that Shakespeare took his cue from Montaigne is relatively uncontroversial—some might even say it is impeccably orthodox. The idea that consciousness was “unfixed and unstable” is supposed to have crossed the Channel with Montaigne’s memoranda.9 Perhaps so, but literary historians oddly and often overlook late Tudor devotional literature that introduces a strikingly similar discovery, a realization that interiority was terribly disorderly, brimming with contradictions, self-accusation, and self-intimidation. Many scholars now mining for the sources for the Jacobethan journeys inward forget that puritan moralists and many expatriate English Jesuits prescribed some strategies to assist faithful Christians to probe their motives, to develop a “noble,” “true” fortitude, and to rest assured that their faith and fortitude pleased God. Missionary priests and reformed preachers encouraged auditors and readers to lose their bearings to find their blessings—that is, to find that God cared enough to counter complacency with confusion and with spasms of self-loathing. But auditors and readers would also learn that God was the source of their sorrows and that their sorrows were symptoms of reconciliation—and therefore were blessings. For example, central to the Jesuits’ evangelical ethos were Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and other efforts at counseling that aimed to inspire self-analysis and R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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personal reorientation. But disorientation was the first step toward reorientation. Pietists among religiously reformed and unreformed— among Calvinists and Catholics—circulated sermons, devotional literature, and epistolary counsel and consolation that recommended self-doubt as part of a salutary self-exploration that structured desires and determined the intensity of repentance.10 Reformists thought it usually cheerless, occasionally “violent,” yet always “necessarie work.” Richard Rogers referred to it as an inventory of sorts, an “order taking with ourselves,” and instructed readers to reserve time from the ordinary business of their day for “soliloquies,” which gave the self an unobstructed view of its “strayings and infirmities.”11 Literary historian Anne Ferry says that such self-sifting (“clearing”) created a “generalized self” that appeared patterned and inauthentic when measured against the individuated protagonists Jacobethan poets and playwrights conjured into existence.12 But Ferry’s contrast seems overplayed to me. Conceivably, Jacobethan playgoers were just as impressed by the similarities between what they saw onstage and what they read on the pages of devotional manuals or heard from the pulpits, because so much of it advocated, inspired, and ennobled prodigal souls’ self-searching soliloquies in the religion around Shakespeare.

“ T he T ru e F e e l i ng of R e l i g i on” Reformists maintained that it was incumbent on faithful Christians to shape a distinctive presence in this world. The faithful, preoccupied with their “strayings and infirmities,” were called to be miserable. If ever they should start to believe that their goodwill and good deeds curried favor in the celestial court and that they had earned God’s grace, they should immediately “clear” that conceit, which—in  the end—would count against them. According to the prolific Suffolk preacher Nicholas Bownde, King David discovered precisely that, and the misery and repentance his discovery occasioned were useful precedents. On Bownde’s pages, plagues and other afflictions in Elizabethan England lodged alongside David’s temptations to renounce {  128  } 

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God’s righteousness. Yet David’s humiliation turned into humility, not self-pity, and humility led to self-accusation. David seized—and Bownde’s contemporaries were to seize—every chance to “judge themselves worthie of death and [to] be humbled before God.” But Bownde’s contemporaries disappointed him. They moaned about their misfortune, justified their conduct, and trumpeted their virtues. They had forgotten the invaluable lesson the Hebrews’ king left them when he dispelled the “doubtfull conjectures” that mere mortals might be sufficiently righteous to compensate for specific sins and earn divine reward. David, deployed by Bownde, showed the religiously reformed how to combat the “conjectures” that kept them from judging themselves “so thorowly that the Lord in his good time might cease judging of us.”13 Yet that formula is misleading. God was not the end of creatures’ self-analysis and repentance, as the phrase “in his good time” would suggest. God “hath the greatest stroke in these distresses of the mind,” in every Christian’s dis-ease, which, as William Perkins explained, attests genuine contrition and “Christian clearing.” God, the choreographer, dances along with his terrestrial company.14 The reason (or necessity) for such celestial accompaniment was not hard to fathom; humans were “frayle” and flailingly ineffective without “the earnest” of God’s spirit “in [their] hearts.” They were wholly incapable of “the true feeling of religion,” Anthony Cade concluded, adding that “meere naturall and civill man” was powerless without “contrary grace,” which battled with human nature’s propensity to justify rather than to condemn its part in the drama of salvation.15 Hence, Christians did not become prodigals until, with God’s “stroke,” they became ashamed and came to “see and feele their sinnes more than other men.”16 The prodigals’ repentance was vividly expressed in their prayers. God’s “stroke” was particularly conspicuous there. Nicholas Bownde noticed as much: “The spirit of God in them . . . is the spirit of prayer and of all assurance, as it stirreth them up to pray. When they cannot tell of themselves what or how to pray as they ought, that same spirit helpeth their infirmities and stirreth up in them sighes and groans and desires of the hart.” Hence, one could claim that the indwelling R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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spirit headquartered in prayer, inasmuch as prayerful repentance was the prodigals’ most important response to God’s promise of pardon, and prayers’ progress was the spirit’s principal work. Bownde believed that prayers began in “great weakenesse and much doubting,” yet, thanks to “the inward working of God’s spirit,” petitioners achieve a “quietnesse of minde” as they develop a “feeling of their wantes” and as they put that feeling in the context of “the promises God made in his Word.”17 The development of a “true feeling of religion” (and the “Christian clearing” required to make a place for it in one’s conscience) was steady, but seldom smooth; indeed, one’s route from indifference and insensibility swerved, doubled back, and swerved again before reaching an assurance of election. Richard Greenham, Bownde’s father-in-law, longtime preacher at Dry Drayton near Cambridge, and reformist expert on consolation, called it “an interchangeable course of sorrow and comfort, of faith and feare.” The distance to one’s destination, which was “quietnesse of minde,” at any given time was uncertain, although what was certain was that the beginning and end belonged to God.18 “Meere naturall and civill man” could do nothing to spur and “stirreth up” sincere self-analysis and “godly sorrow.” Yet add an unnatural impulse—the grace contrary to nature—and the healing would start, if only because comfort came with the understanding that the first stirrings of profound remorse could hardly come from “frayle” nature. So God cared enough to send the very worst—jarring “distresses of the minde” that saved the elect from complacency. God arranged that the curse be a part of the cure, with the result that “his power shall be made perfect and more cleerely seen in our weakenesse.”19 All this seemed so sadistic to John Stachniewski, whose study of the Jacobethan “literature of religious despair” has puritanism’s “forward wits” dragging auditors and readers “toward a rendezvous with [a] persecuting deity.”20 Those wits, Stachniewski conceded, were not fiends; they were victims (and purveyors) of a Calvinism that came with unavoidably cruel consequences. At the center of their religion was “the imperative nature of [an] assurance” of their election that could only be won after an exhaustive, “insatiable” search for {  130  } 

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the sources of sin within. The search was “insatiable” because it was tainted by Calvinism’s sense that a pervasive, irrepressible hypocrisy complicated every well-intentioned effort to take stock of one’s status. The English Calvinists were Stachniewski’s culprits. They were responsible for their religiously reformed countrymen’s endless quests for truths about themselves, quests that were complicated and compromised by the emphasis on self-loathing in the Calvinists’ “literature of religious despair.” That literature, along with the reformists’ sermons, turned God into a persecutor, Stachniewski argues, and “impaled” the faithful on an assurance of election that they could only purchase with their profound discomfort.21 But reformists were consoled by discomfort. “We feele not corruption by corruption,” Arthur Dent explained as he cut a “pathe-way” to heaven for ordinary Christians. “We feele corruption by grace. And the more grace we have, the more quick we are in the feeling of corruption.” As for the “doubting and wavering” that typically plagued faith and threatened to overturn the faithful’s assurances of election, Dent noted that they were hardly cause for despair—no more than “the barking and bawling of a few little currs and whippets.” No bother at all: “Doubtings . . . doe no whit impeach the certainety of salvation but rather argue a perfect soundness and health of [our] soules.”22 Thomas Wilcox took a slightly different tack. In the 1580s, he had been at the center of London’s reformist network with John Field and wrote an entire “discourse” on doubting when its initiatives suffered setbacks. According to Wilcox, doubt was natural—logical— because humans were imperfect. Faith’s performances would always be flawed, despite God’s “owne grace in us.” But “the doctrine of the gospel . . . ministreth much comfort,” because it contains a promise that the “waverings” of faith will not prejudice God’s pardon.23 Ministering comfort from the pulpit was no easy matter. Former playwright and reformist pamphleteer Stephen Gosson declared that “the hardest profession in the world [is] to be a preacher.” In theory, the reformed Christians’ “wavering” or dialectic between doubt and faith enriched religious experience, yet, in practice, those Christians seemed to experience the dialectic as a duel, “a combat of contraries.”24 But reformist preacher John Phillips relished the challenges of R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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making sense of that apparent duel and of reassuring the elect that they were never left “to grope as graceless.” “When they fal into the lapse of sinne,” as, of course, they must, grace stirs remorse. Then, “touched with the finger of God’s grace, they, like prodigall sons [who] wandered from the sheepe folds . . . crie out and return to their father again.” En route, understandably, they were bewildered and anxious, yet their vexation was a critical part of “the true feeling of religion”; the faithful “crie out,” whereas seemingly sturdier sorts, precociously proud, boast of their virtues and look to be more righteous, less tormented. Such appearances deceived, Phillips summed up; the seemingly sturdy were hardly “heartelie sorie for their sinnes.” They remained far from “the fruitful faith” and “earnest repentance” that might have given them assurances that, in God’s sight, they were “members of the true church of Christ [who] continuallie travel under the crosse.”25 Stephen Egerton was heard to call it “a heavenly journey,” notwithstanding its “manie trials [and] fears.” The religiously reformed, repentant, and self-analytical were “sorrowfull pilgrim[s]” but were never “lefte comfortless.”26 Spasms of despair were unavoidable. Nothing could completely prevent them, yet Edward Topsell, the curate at St. Botolph’s, Aldgate, was as determined as other London reformist impresarios around Shakespeare to see that such spasms did not debilitate. He prescribed “preservative[s] against desperation.”27 The one prescribed most often was self-accusation, which, one would think, caused rather than calmed despair. But the will to indict oneself, as we now know, was taken as an encouraging sign of the presence of “contrary grace” and thus of election. Consuetudo peccandi tollit sensum peccati: sinners were so habituated to sin, according to Anthony Maxey, a rector in Norfolk and a chaplain to King James I, that only grace could get them to admit as much and to “feele their corruption.”28 The Bible was a second preservative against desperation. From its stories, Jacobethan Christians saw that they were not the first to “feele a greate deale of infirmitie in [them]selves.” The faithful in Rome, Corinth, and Galatia learned from correspondence and commerce with the apostle Paul that they could count on divine grace and pardon. Referring to those first Christians, Edward Dering noted that {  132  } 

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“they [were], as wee, fraile and weake,” docking his “wee” alongside antiquity’s “they” to suggest that God saw good not only in scripture’s “saintes and holy ones” but in ordinary Christians in early modern England. God saw more good in both sets of faithful Christians “than [they] themselves could feele” at first.29 And, because desperation still dispirited those ordinary Christians, their pastors and preachers reminded them that sacraments were given “for the taking awaye of doubt and distruste.” Ideally, therefore, their confidence was “underpropped and confirmed” by sacraments as well as by scriptures and self-incrimination, and they could be assured “of the grace and favor of God touching the forgiveness of [their] sinnes.” That was the line taken by Thomas Wilcox in formulating “a doctrine of doubting,” which he fully expected Catholic theologians to peg as unorthodox. Hence, he included his complaints against his critics. They misread the promise of pardon “sealed” by the sacraments, he said, adding that “the Romish synagogue” undermined the confidence of its faithful and cultivated “doubt and distruste” rather than faith to make it easier for popes and prelates to extort funds from Christians queuing for forgiveness.30 Wilcox was alluding to the conditions priests reportedly placed on absolution— specifically, to the stipulation that the absolved pay for pardons. Priests held back the good news that forgiveness was free so that the Catholic clerical establishment might profit by intensifying the laity’s uncertainties and charging for temporary relief. Unsurprisingly, from the Catholics’ missionary literature, one retrieves a very different image of the unreformed—English Catholic priests, Jesuits, other expatriate “seminarie men,” and the Jacobethan Catholic laity they all served. For example, layman George Gilbert stressed the heroism of clerical itinerants who crossed from the Continent during the early 1580s and who risked their lives to rekindle a “true feeling of religion” among “frosty” Catholics (Cattolici freddi), who seldom attended Mass and who filled their bellies (riempo la pancia) when they ought to have fasted.31 “Papistry” had been forced underground by that time. Pastoral counseling was not readily available, so Jesuit Robert Persons composed and circulated something of a self-help manual to explain to R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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laymen how to undertake the “weghtye busines” of their salvation: “A Christian may judge of him selfe whether he performe [and] do the thinge for whiche he was sente into this worlde.” From Christ— without clerical mediation—the faithful received not only detailed instructions on how to please God but “also force and habilitie, by his grace, whereby we are made able” to “fly evil” and “doe good.” Fleeing evil and doing good began with self-arraignment. Persons told his readers to start by unequivocally acknowledging and repenting their “infirmitie.”32 Repentance was disorienting, he conceded; how distressing to face the fact that—and to figure out why—God was “styrred up” against the way one lived! Recusants and church papists in the realm justifiably experienced “servile fear.” They had to hide their faith or to practice it privately and irregularly. They learned from historians that God had expected heroism and martyrdom from Catholics who confronted difficult circumstances in the past. Hence, they likely suspected that their compromises and cowardice—despite the political problems they faced—as well as other shortcomings might prompt God to punish them. The aim of Persons’s “exercises” was to change their suspicion, “everye daye, into love.” Among the English Catholics trembling “in feare onlie for dreade of punishment,” he circulated his Directory, urging them to tremble only at the thought that they offended a God who so loved the world that he sent his only son to atone for its sins, for their sins. Had God been a tyrant, Catholics who had grown indifferent to the fate of their church might be tempted to bury their guilt beneath flurries of excuses. But when they realized that their indifference offended a loving, forgiving father, they would cease prevaricating and would expose their sinful selves to “the very eye of [their] soule[s].” Persons called such self-assessment “consideration” and compared penitents to prudent travelers from London to Constantinople, who measured their progress daily, calculated distances to their destination, and monitored their resolve and their readiness to reach it. Traveling from earth to heaven, the faithful should likewise consider their preparation and progress, gauged both by their willingness to trade “servile feare” for frank appraisals of their offenses and, finally, for an assurance that God would reward their “consideration” {  134  } 

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and celebrate their resolve to repent. The alternative would be to assume that a merciful God “will perdone easile,” but that assumption, Persons warned, prohibited Catholics from developing a “true feeling of religion,” which started with a sense that God was “styrred up” and then stirred up godly sorrow or remorse in sinners.33 For Persons, “consideration” led to the penitent’s resolve to accept “the austeritie of a vertuous life,” as had martyrs and monks. For the latter, convents were perfect nests or incubators where contemplation developed as “consideration” and issued in the determination to confront the struggles with sin that God choreographed for them. Edmund Bunny, one of Archbishop Grindal’s chaplains and a canon of Carlisle Cathedral who abridged Calvin’s Institutes for publication in 1579, adapted Persons’s Directory for religiously reformed readers. Bunny hastened to point out, however, that irreverence ruled in the Catholics’ convents, which came to be “laden with looseness and superstition.”34 In England, the point was moot; aside from a few chapels on recusants’ estates, locations for undistracted “consideration” were hard to find and to keep secret. Persons urged his collaborators to improvise. Gardens, parks, and remote rural settings: missionaries were to locate places where Cattolici freddi could reflect relatively safely and single-mindedly on their sins and salvation.35 Persons was aware that he and other expatriate missionaries returning to England were working in a world-turned-upside-down, a world in which the Catholic laity ordered around—and the reformed laity chased around—devout priests. Possibly, what disturbed clerics who had come from abroad more than their dependence on the resident, recusant laity was that laity’s independence and ostensible intractability. It seemed to Persons that many church papists needed throttling rather than coaching and counseling. They were as resistant to the Jesuit counselors, he said, as the Hebrews had been inhospitable to their prophets. Stiff-necked Hebrews and Catholics exhibited “so . . . perverse an alienation” from God. Jacobethan Catholics had much to learn from the Old Testament prophets’ shrill indictments (from their “kynde of speeche”), which addressed both the Jews in biblical times and sixteenth-century Christians. Persons speculated that they applied personally, R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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perhappes also unto thy selfe many tymes everie day, for that thou refusest [God’s] good motions and other meanes sent from hym to draw thee to his service, thou being resolved not to yeeld therunto, but to folowe thy pursuite, whatsoever persuasions shall come to the contrarie[.] Alas how many Christians be there . . . which abhorre to here good counsayle? feare and tremble to reade good bookes? fly and detest the frequentation of godlie companie lest perhappes by suche occasions they might be touched in conscience, converted, and saved?36 Avoiding godly company and counsel, too many Catholics, on Persons’s count, also avoided confronting their “infirmitie” and ingratitude. “Obduration and hardnes of hart,” he claimed, prevented them from experiencing godly sorrow. The prelates who assembled at the Council of Trent in 1551 ordered that confessionals become tribunals to shame the doggedly indifferent. The Jesuits’ spiritual exercises served similarly as remedies for “a most dangerous and desperate disease”—“almost a remedyles disease,” this “obduration.” Person’s “exercise” was therapy. It commended “consideration,” which, as noted, evolved as “compunction, and repentance,” so that a Catholic may “judge him selfe” and incriminate himself. All of this, to repeat (although now in Persons’s words) should “move a kinder hart, a humble and contrite spirite to . . . earnest amendement of lyfe.”37 Bunny valued Persons’s words and was persuaded that, scrubbed of its Catholic sentiment, the Jesuit’s Directory would usefully nudge religiously reformed readers to spiritual renewal. Bunny believed Persons’s work could shape religious personality in a manner compatible with English Calvinists’ recommendations for the tidying up of the prodigal soul. Of course, none of what Bunny called Persons’s “idols” could be spared: what there was of purgatory, satisfaction, merits, “munkerie, forced virginitie, [and] wilfull poverty” had to go. But what was left in the Directory would assist Christians of all stripes to overcome their resistance to self-accusation. Persons, predictably, despised the pirated, purged edition of his work and argued {  136  } 

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that Bunny’s effort to prop up reformed spirituality with Jesuit exercises was doomed from the start, because Calvinism in England was a spiritually bankrupt civil religion. Bunny responded that England’s faith and established church were robust. “Temporal commoditie” (political convenience) had played no part in his realm’s embrace of Calvinist causes and theology. “We know (as wel as you) that al erthly prosperitie is subject to mutabilitie,” he answered, and that reformed religion in England is securely established because it pleases God, not because it pleases a queen. Persons and the unreformed preferred to please popes, Bunny concluded; they set their doctrine and decretals precariously on a “rock” they called Rome.38 Bunny enthusiastically joined the chorus of English reformers who criticized the bishops of Rome for “meddl[ing] with civill causes” and who read Tudor history as an indictment of Catholic prelates. In  the late 1520s, Pope Clement  VII was an obstacle to King Henry VIII’s pursuit of the divorce that, he presumed, would supply him (and England), upon his remarriage, with a male heir. Fewer than fifty years later, another pope, Pius V, excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. There seemed to be no end to papal meddling, and, by the early 1580s, Catholicism’s English critics identified Jesuits as executors of Rome’s most egregious and invidious policies. Bunny compared Jesuits’ strategy to that of Thomas à Becket. Jesuits—much as that “arrogant” twelfth-century archbishop—were intent on forcing English Catholics to choose between “a foreign priest” and their queen.39 Expatriate “Jesuits, seminarie priests, and all the[ir] company of unnaturall impes” made their choice when they left England; returning to force that choice on others was unpardonable and more than sufficient reason, according to Bunny, to condemn Persons. But that was no reason to disregard (and to discard) Persons’s contributions to the development of religious self-awareness. The publication of Bunny’s adaptations of those creditable contributions, however, was by no means an ecumenical gesture. No rapprochement was intended. Still, resourceful reformed Christian pastors were meant to extract exercises and ideas that could help them stop “worldly minded” parishioners from “utter[ly] extinguishing” and “great[ly] hindering” all the “good motions of the spirit of God.”40 R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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Reformed and unreformed agreed, then, that the spirit’s “good motions” kept pious Christians “continual[ly] exercising.” Bunny even admitted, discreetly, that such “exercising” included obligatory charitable activities, yet he also accused Roman Catholics of turning “to superstitious and very ill uses” legacies and endowments given for charitable ends.41 Priests favored endowing chantries, for example, although (or because) chantries reinforced belief in purgatory and in the effectiveness of one Christian’s goodwill upon another’s salvation. Persons consistently referred to charitable endowments as “monuments” to “good motions” of the spirit. The monuments and motions suggested to Catholics the presence and solidarity of a community in which prayers of the living assisted the dead, and in which the dead were somehow present to, and influential among, the living. Emphasis on that kind of mystical, mutual aid and on exercises earned Jesuits a reputation as novipelagiani, neopelagians, who inflated the importance of good intentions and underestimated the necessity for God’s grace in the order of salvation.42 Persons, however, seemed skeptical about humanity’s best efforts to affect divine judgment. He  adeptly yoked divine grace to human will so that nearly no weight fell on the latter. “Christ, that is, his grace,” was the “great oxe” stationed “at one end and our endevor at the other.” The oxe “onelie requireth that we should goe on with hym comfortablie and not refuse to enter unto the yoke with hym.”43 Because Persons’s take on the collaboration between divine grace and human will was close—yet not close enough—to the religiously reformed consensus, Bunny clarified: Persons kept grace, the “great oxe,” apart from “our endevor” at the other end, Bunny said, whereas in the rival, reformed scheme, “regenerate [Christians] have an indevor framed in them by grace, but otherwise the natural children of Adam have noe such of themselves, but only to evil.”44 Hence, Persons should be congratulated, “in respect of the faith that in grosse [he] holde[s].” He should, in some sense, be counted among Christians (“to be of the church”). Nonetheless, Bunny went on, addressing Persons, “as you holde it,” Christianity comes to look like a “fowle and great apostacie.” What Bunny valued was Persons’s plan for restructuring religious personality. Implementing that plan, as far as Bunny {  138  } 

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could tell, Persons was a charlatan, trying to revive Rome’s magic and Catholicism’s “munkerie.”45 Bunny was less hostile toward Luis de Granada, a Dominican friar whose work also appealed to Persons. For de Granada, pious Christians were perpetually perplexed. How else could they react to the clods of envy, ambition, and corruption that obstructed their every effort to pass from the miseries of this world to the rewards of the next? Still, de Granada, much as the Jesuits, was sure that absolution was on offer in the sacrament of penance and that “wrangling puritane calvenist[s]” were motivated by “great malice and folie.” But reformists saw to the English translation of de Granada’s texts inasmuch as that literature—as Persons’s Directory—echoed what Jacobethan Protestants were preaching about “the true feeling of religion,” about the self-accusation, vexation, and sorrow that seemed “very merciful and medicinable.”46 Weeping signaled that the medicine was working. De  Granada tried his hand at child psychology to elaborate: “lothsome to behold,” infants come from the womb with ambitions that they cannot articulate and will find utterly impossible to satisfy. All they can do at the start of life—without instruction—and at the end of life—with frustration— is weep. But tears cleanse and heal.47 The English Catholic mission’s unrivaled master of tears was Robert Southwell, who had left Norfolk for the seminary at Douai in Flanders in 1576. From there, he went to Rome to continue his studies with the Jesuits. He took the monthlong Exercise, devised by the order’s founder, Ignatius Loyola, and the first week’s meditations left a lasting impression on him. He had been encouraged at the time to “feel the interior knowledge” of his sins. Southwell drew inspiration from the Jesuits’ confessional program into the poetry he wrote to inspire self-interrogation and contrition. Back in England, his poems helped him meet daunting pastoral challenges. Missionaries had to console and counsel Catholics who stayed in England and attended the established reformed churches to preserve their positions in society and their possessions. Could sorrow prompt them to weep when strategies for survival required them assiduously to control their emotions? That question may have occurred to Southwell as he contemplated returning from the Continent.48 R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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Robert Persons began asking for Southwell in autumn 1584. Jesuit colleagues who landed with the first wave had been captured. But the order’s general in Rome was not yet reconciled to having Southwell exposed to danger in England when his impressive intellectual gifts might be put to excellent use and safely so elsewhere.49 Still, Persons persisted, and his superior, Aquaviva, acquiesced. Southwell left for England in late May 1586. In June 1592, he was arrested, frequently interrogated thereafter, and finally executed in 1595. But Southwell, by then, repeatedly and memorably had given voice to sinful souls sorrowfully confronting their imperfections. “My tears, my drink,” Southwell has King David confide in the poem “David’s Peccavi,” which displays how—but also explains why— his royal subject’s “wayling minde,” once “taught to know the worth of vertue’s joyes,” “did hate it selfe for loving fancie’s toyes.” Fancy is a villain in Southwell’s poem “Man’s Civill Warre,” a villain who “overrule[s]” will and wit. Hence, “Civill Warre” finishes rather ominously with the warning “Sell not thy soule for brittle joy,” although King David’s confession is substantially more hopeful, foreshadowing reclamation. “Wit lost his ayme and Will was fancie’s prey”—nonetheless, the subject came to grief, grief “bought” back Wit, and Will taught by Wit “will mend.”50 Southwell’s subjects had as much difficulty struggling with irresolution as did Hamlet. “Shun delaies, they breed remorse,” says one of the poet’s would-be confessors, though “long demurres” and “many stayes” are the very stuff of the poem he inhabits, as they were of Shakespeare’s play. For Southwell, those delays enable remorse to ripen as repentance.51 In his “Prodigall Child’s Soule Wracke,” the narrator, “grown rich in vice, in vertue poore,” becomes aware of his predicament as “waves of wo” wash over him or her. “Soule Wracke” draws out the metaphor: The wrestling winds with raging blasts Still hold me in cruell chace. They broke my anchors, sailes, and masts, Permitting no reposing place.

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The boistrous seas with swelling flouds, On every side did work their spight, Heaven overcast with stormie clouds, Denide the Planets guiding light. The hellish furies lay in wait, To winne my soule into their power, To make me bite at every bait, Wherein my bane I might devoure. Thus heaven and hell, thus sea and land, Thus stormes and tempests did conspire, With just revenge of scourging hand, To witnes God’s deserved ire.52 The criticism that Southwell was “unable to paint sin in other than dark colors” misses the point at which he started.53 Readers pick up the prodigal after the threshold of self-accusation was crossed. By  then, the prodigal’s “Will [was] taught by Wit” or, as “Soule Wracke” clarifies, “taught [“by darkenes”] to know my light.” The speaker’s “enforced tears” accompanied self-knowledge, which was self-evidently tragic “till mercy raisde me from my fall, and grace my ruines did repaire” at the poem’s end. So sin has to be darkly colored. Light or self-knowledge and religious intelligence, as well as profound religious feeling, developed from the darkness. The “mercilessly exposed psychologies” that Anne Sweeney identifies as Southwell’s specialty were forged from the sinners’ sorrow.54 Southwell also attended to the martyrs’ suffering, which led to what Susannah Brietz Monta calls their “salvational confidence.” The martyrs’ ordeals seemed to him superior to the “psycho-spiritual struggles” in reformed circles that hardly qualified as “pseudo-martyrdom.”55 Yet the religiously reformed continued to commend what could be learned from the “darkenes” they experienced as a kind of death—their arrogance and complacence, after all, had died. Had they not turned inward, confronting the “darkenes” there, and had they not  been

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terrified, reflecting on “God’s deserved ire,” sinners would not have come to construe their “repaire” as biblical and redemptive, and to “feel” it as something both intimate and transcendent. “Deserved ire” played the same large part in reformists’ remarks on “repaire.” “You shalbe damned,” Arthur Dent prophesied, “except ye have this cleering of your selves.” From the early 1580s, long before he cut his Plaine Man’s Path-Way to, and through, repentance—and while tussling with the diocesan authorities in Essex—Dent connected God’s irritability with the prospect of damnation and related both to sinners’ development of a saving “indignation.” Dent spent his career campaigning for mercy for conscientious nonconformist clergy but advised the reformed not to “presume . . . upon God’s mercy.” Instead, they should ponder God’s wrath and justice.56 And they should dwell as well on what, within themselves, so displeased God! Without knowing what to confess and what to “cleer,” the reformed faithful could hardly experience a “true feeling of religion,” originating in one’s sorrowful self-awareness and developing— with contrition—into something akin to the prodigal’s “soule wracke.” Dent, though, was asked by some parishioners to help them avoid the “strong purgations” that his sermons urged on them. He replied with a question—“Would you have plaisters before you have wounds?”— then explained that there were no shortcuts, no quick ways to acquire assurances of election and, with it, “the true feeling of religion.” Marrowless or mild self-deprecation would gain nothing; Dent could and would comfort them only when he saw their “faces blubbered with weeping and [their] heartes molified and sorrowing with care.”57 His mention of weeping and of “mournefull lessons” about human “infirmitie” recalls Robert Southwell’s unambiguous preference for tears. Plausibly, Dent would have considered his pastoral challenges well met if he had heard from parishioners what Southwell scripted for one of his spokesmen (and, in effect, what Shakespeare wrote for his Hamlet): “Thou hast made me to my selfe a hell.”58 Southwell’s spokesman, in this instance, was Saint Peter. Medieval and Jacobethan Catholic polemicists frequently drew that apostle into their vindications of popes’ claims to authority over all Christian churches. Said to have been the first bishop of Rome and to have {  142  } 

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deposited his powers with his successors there—notably, his power to bind and loose any sinner, including sinful princes and sinful prelates—Saint Peter was central to the Catholics’ replies to antipapal rhetoric. They could say, after all, that Peter’s place in church history and his power to absolve had been explicitly attested in the Gospel of Matthew (6:18–19)—“on this rock.” Jesuits were known for opposing alternative readings of that controversial passage as part of what historian Michael Questier calls their “aggressive” initiative to enforce papal supremacy, yet Southwell’s Saint Peter is less a paladin of papal authority and more an everyman of sorts, an emblematically sorrowful and self-lacerating sinner.59 Southwell’s “Complaynt of St.  Peter” started as a translation of Luigi Tansillo’s “Lagrime di San  Pietro.” But the translator purged what Pierre Janelle now calls Tansillo’s “good natured garrulity.” Southwell, that is, turned Tansillo’s text into a Petrarchan rapture, into his own “great lyric of remorse.”60 It becomes an investigation of betrayal that, watered with the apostle’s weeping—“the howrely rent of stintless teares” paid out every few verses—grows into a remarkable specimen of Jacobethan self-analysis.61 But other critics think otherwise. Louis Martz had to squint, he said, to see the “hints of intense self-awareness” in Southwell’s “Complaynt.”62 Nancy Brown claims it “subordinated” “subjective elements” to “the tribune of penance,” safeguarding that sacrament’s central role in unreformed religion.63 Undeniably, the church’s rituals and ways of thinking about redemption influenced the presentation of the saint’s shame and “complaynt.” Indeed, the sacrament of penance surfaces in Southwell’s adaptation of “Lagrime,” as Saint Peter, nursing self-contempt, imagines his funeral: “my teares, my dole . . . Penance, my tomb . . . doleful sighes, the knill.” Yet the sacrament’s status comes to resemble that of outpatient surgery; Saint Peter heals because he so often dissolves in “deep sighes” and “thicke sobs.” The apostle’s constant contrition has him alternately trusting that his “teares appease” and mistrusting his trust. The dialectic, not the sacrament, saves him.64 Southwell dropped his—and Tansillo’s—Saint  Peter on reformist Richard Greenham’s “interchangeable course.” The apostle’s appeals R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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to Mary unmistakably marked his “Complaynt” as Catholic, although its shifts from faith to fear and back are confessionally bipartisan and symptomatic of what reformists diagnosed as, ultimately, soterially hygienic “distresses of the minde.” Southwell’s apostle knows that his “inner feeling” of remorse is unfeigned, but he is not sure that Mary will “the sorrow with the sinner see.” And even if she does, “can mother like what did the sonne abjure, or hart deflowred a virgin’s love redeeme”? Doubts, it seems, recur, nearly capsizing the penitent’s contrition and confidence.65 If Pierre Janelle is correct, Southwell did not learn “to distrust and disregard himself” at Douai. Instead, he acquired his eagerness for self-effacement in England and brought to the Society of Jesus and to Catholic friends across the Channel what was said about the religious personality in the religion around Shakespeare.66 There, in England, reformers were sanitizing Saint Peter in the 1580s. They conveniently forgot the apostle’s reputation as a champion of papal supremacy. They remembered him rather as a proto-Protestant “successfully negotiating the penitential process”—as the “mappe of human frailtie,” as an “anatomie of a repentant sinner” with exemplary “inward greefe.” One could argue that Saint Peter hit his stride on Greenham’s “interchangeable course of sorrow and comfort,” and, as Karen Bruhn now suggests, showed English Calvinists how they might manage the dialectic. Bruhn proves that the reformists paid attention. William Broxup doctored Southwell’s “Complaynt” for reformed readers.67 Perhaps we should depict Broxup’s surgery and Bunny’s rehabilitation of Persons’s Directory as efforts to smuggle Catholics’ soteriology into their enemy’s camp. Or should we, as Michael Questier recommends, look for “like-minded proselytizers” on both sides of the confessional divide—look, that is, for polemicists, preachers, and authors of devotional literature whose objectives were so similar that they wrote in “identical” terms about the “arousal of the will under the influence of grace”? Questier prefers not to recycle what he considers to be colleagues’ “misleading” descriptions of Jesuits as “Catholic puritans,” but he is struck by equivalent “evangelical impulses” in the religion around Shakespeare.68

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“ W e Are A l l F r ai l ” We will never know how closely Shakespeare observed “evangelical impulses” around him, but we now know that the “inward greefe” and contrition rivetingly described on each side of the confessional divide were difficult to miss. Some of Robert Southwell’s phrases resurfaced at the Globe, enough to tempt historian Peter Milward to dub the Jesuit’s poetry a “storehouse of Shakespearean phrases.” Milward was especially impressed by “the large number of parallels with Hamlet,” and the protagonist’s orgy of self-doubt does look like the prodigal’s “soul wracke”—as do the puritan idealizations of the prodigal. In every age, onstage, Shakespeare’s Danish prince is a relic of the cultural practice favored by both the “forward” Jacobethan Calvinists and the expatriate Catholic pietists, all of whom came close to consecrating inconstancy and to equating “the true feeling of religion” with an intensely inward and disorienting search for consolations (among Jesuits) and for assurances of election (among puritans).69 But the problem with pairing Hamlet with the puritan prodigal is that Shakespeare took “pleasure in teasing” puritanical Calvinists, as Jonathan Bate says, suggesting that the playwright’s ridicule was repayment for reformists’ opposition to theatrical entertainment.70 Malvolio in Twelfth Night and blustery Falstaff play their puritanisms for laughs, but Angelo in Measure for Measure looks to be a more direct attack on puritan piety and pretension. Onstage, he turns out to be a terrible tyrant when deputized by Duke Vincentio “to enforce or qualify the laws” (1.1.65). The duke, disguised as a friar, watches as Angelo dusts off an old statute against extramarital intercourse and prepares to enforce it mercilessly—and, as playgoers discover, hypocritically. Angelo boasts of “the austereness of [his] life” (2.4.154) but promises to pardon Claudio, caught in bed with his intended, in exchange for sexual favors. If Claudio’s sister, Isabella, who was just about to take her vows in the convent as the play began, will sleep with him, Angelo will spare her brother. Angelo is usually taken as evidence of Shakespeare’s demonization of the realm’s puritans. Debora Shuger’s study of Jacobethan

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“political theologies” tellingly makes that argument, starting with what she configures as the “fundamental opposition between the penitential models,” which encourage virtue, and a “puritan disciplinary” model, which punishes vice. John Whitgift and conformist bishops, Shuger alleges, implemented the former as part of a program she describes as “inclusive churchmanship.” The latter, she continues, had been reupholstered in “the modern puritanisms of the religious Right” in the United States, which, during the last decade of the twentieth century and early in the twenty-first, took great pains to legislate morality. Shuger’s late Tudor puritans have no patience for prodigals, and no pardons. Indeed, a “blanket repudiation of penitential in favor of penal justice characterizes the puritan reformation of manners.”71 But Angelo appears to me—and may have appeared to many playgoers—as more caricature than characterization. Much the same may be said about the “coldly legalistic” Isabella, whom he tries to seduce. She is often unfeeling. To Lucio, dispatched to pluck her from the convent to become Claudio’s advocate, Isabella’s Catholicism looks to be low on compassion.72 She fetishizes chastity and, doing so, presumably may have struck Protestant playgoers as an excellent example of what their preachers told them about monks and nuns who typically put too much stock in their vows and virtues. And the preachers were echoing the criticism of convents in both confessional camps, wherever righteousness was depicted as a struggle rather than as an achievement that miraculously made every cloister a collection of saints and every saint an impregnable fortress against temptations.73 Angelo and Isabella were caricatures cut from the same cloth. Both placed constraints on intimacy that, in the play, were unrealistic. In the end, Isabella is ready—or should one say, resigned—to marry Vincentio, who unmasks himself and instructs his deputy Angelo to marry the lover he had abandoned when her dowry was lost. Caricatures normally contain some truth, which polemicists expertly stretch. The conformists depicted puritans as fanatics for discipline who excessively censured sexual misbehavior, who wanted the promiscuous put to death, and who would have had disobedient children on scaffolds as well.74 But evidence suggests puritans countenanced excommunication rather than extermination when neighbors {  146  } 

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committed such “enormous crymes as incest, adultery, and such lyke.”75 Angelo’s endorsement of the law making premarital intimacy a capital offense exaggerates what Peter Lake calls “the puritan impulse.”76 True, reformist and conformist moralists alike frowned on bridal pregnancies. True as well, puritan disciplinary strategies polarized some communities, as Keith Wrightson and David Levine suggest in their study of a Kent village where highly placed puritans “aggressive[ly]” and “confrontational[ly]” pursued delinquent, destitute locals. Yet, whatever polarization he may have witnessed and attributed to puritans’ “fantasies of order,” Shakespeare, visiting the Midlands, would have become familiar as well with the godly elites of Warwickshire, where puritans urged propertied coreligionists to show “a charitable devocon” to impoverished tenants.77 Still, puritans’ reputation for aggressive, confrontational meddling persisted, largely because the circulation of accusations to that effect served the conformist critics’ self-interest. Pushing puritans to the periphery and making their demands for strict discipline seem a threat to “national” unity left the center—close to Court—for conformists. Hence, the conformists mocked up smug, dishonest, self-delusional puritans who came across in polemics as little angels (or as Angelos) with feet of clay, “girdling” themselves in sanctity. Matthew Sutcliffe summarized: the puritans only pretended to be pious, he said, and they passed off their plans to rule their parishes as plans to purify the realm. Their piety would hardly survive an Isabella, Sutcliffe would have said, had he seen the play, for he insisted that puritans were no more able to rule their passions than were the mere mortals they sanctimoniously criticized. Even without Measure’s female lead, however, conformists could tell (and they told others) that the puritans’ program for a disciplined commonwealth or church scrubbed of sin rested wholly on outlandish, hypocritical assessments of the state of their own souls.78 But Angelo is a better facsimile of the puritans around Shakespeare when gusts of self-doubt blow him off course, when he questions his motives. Several times he accuses himself of “false seeming.” He is less prone to self-analysis than was Hamlet, but nearly as troubled. The encounters with Isabella show him how badly his R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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“girdle” of sanctity fits, and he takes seriously—soliloquaciously—the predicament, for which prayer offers no way out. Probing his piety, he discovers duplicity. When I would pray and think, I think and pray To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words, Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue, Anchors on Isabel. Heaven in my mouth, As if I only did but chew his name, And in my heart the strong and swelling evil Of my conception. The state, whereon I studied, Is like a good thing, being often read, Grown seared and tedious; yea my gravity, Wherein, let no man hear me, I take pride, Could I, with boot, change for an idle plume Which the air beats for vain. O place, O form, How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit, Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls To thy false seeming! (2.4.1–15) Angelo shrinks from the sin that “the most just law” forbids—and for which Isabella’s brother must pay with his life—yet he is drawn to commit it and to compromise the law, himself, and the object of his affection.79 He was attracted first by her virtue. His soliloquies say so, in part, to exculpate him. “Dost thou desire her foully for those things that make her good?” Has the devil, “to catch a saint,” impeccable Angelo, “bait[ed the] hook” with a saint (2.2.180–81)? Possibly Shakespeare here was having some fun with puritans’ and convents’ notoriety for sanctity. He appears to have realized that flawed humans were bound to fall short of their loftiest expectations. Vocations, for the most fervent Calvinists and Catholics, imposed burdens beneath which the sturdiest Christians were bound to buckle. Would a typical puritan reformist be unaware of precisely that or be worried sometimes, as is Angelo, that “when once our grace we have forgot, nothing goes right” (4.4.34–35)? {  148  } 

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To be sure, reformists on the fringe became convinced that they could not lose or “forget” the grace they had. Onstage, before he was overwhelmed with desire for Isabella, Angelo was of that kind, yet his confidence evaporated, as did that of those puritan and Jesuit pietists whom we have found weeping or worrying about the acceptability of their remorse. Nonetheless, a number of puritans who pushed off from the established church were as cocksure as their contemporary critics claimed and, we learned, as not a few historians say. Among the former— the Jacobethan critics—one comes across moderate reformists who fiercely disliked separatist colleagues, who, William Crashaw asserted, were infected with a “horrible and hellish pride.”80 Crashaw had the followers of Robert Browne in mind, radical reformists who left for the Continent to avoid worshipping with their more complacent neighbors during the 1580s. They and those who departed in their wake—or who went underground in London—declared that less impatient neighbors were “under God’s wrath,” as George Gifford reported. He compared the “proud obstinacie” of the radicals-turned-separatists with the arrogance and intolerance of Catholic Christians of late antiquity—the pars Donati or Donatists of North Africa. Augustine robustly opposed them during the early fifth century for uncharitably condemning roughly half the Christians of Carthage and thereabouts. According to Augustine, Donatists misread their Bible, mistaking passages that referred to the final or eschatological separation of wheat from chaff—good from evil— for orders to stage an immediate exodus and to organize an alternative church. The schism that resulted was deplorable, Augustine said, and Gifford echoed him: “our Donatists of England” misconstrued sacred texts as egregiously as had the North African separatists, their late antique ancestors. The English radicals’ “speeches” about polity and prayer, Gifford went on, were “patched with errors, almost as thick as the patches upon a beggar’s cloak.” And because they “insolentlie extoll themselves,” their “very swelling” prohibits them from seeing the validity of the moderate puritans’ biblical scholarship, which, to refer to one contested issue, identified precedents for scripted as well as for impromptu prayers in earliest Christian practice.81 Gifford was particularly irritated by the separatists’ insistence that all religiously reformed Christians improvise rather than read their R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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prayers.82 Yet he hazarded that the English Donatists got praying— and so much more—wrong as a result of their failures to get the core reformation doctrine right. They had not learned that fideism “covers” a multitude of sins. Overly scrupulous separatists, in other words—Gifford’s words—“maketh the stablenesse of God’s covenant towards his people and with his church depend uppon the workes of men.” Substitute the term “commonwealth” for “church” in Gifford’s screed, and one has fuel enough to incinerate Angelo’s premises for what we have heard Debora Shuger call penal puritanism. Affirming that by open grosse sinne committed by any, if they remayne still in the church, the covenant is not only disannulled to them but unto all that communicate with them [separatists] so make the stablesness of God’s covenant not to depend upon mercie and free grace promised and bound with an oth, but uppon our works, yea, and in a more tickl[ish] estate, even uppon the workes of other[s] whome we must judge. Therefore the Brownists mayntayne verie wicked heresse when they crye out that those assemblyes where any open sinners are not cast forth, they be no longer the true church of God.83 Gifford’s complaints about “the verie wicked heresse” certainly should give pause to anyone casting about for the harshly disciplinary or penal character of what historians have come to describe as “the puritan reformation of manners.” And Angelo’s severity seems to place him with the separatists rather than with the irenic puritans who tried to impress upon intolerant reformist brethren that “right excellent men [sometimes] come short in some things about the ordering of God’s church”—and to remind the intolerant that the apostles had not been quick to exclude from churches coreligionists who “erred grosslie.”84 Literary historian Huston Diehl suspects that Measure for Measure signals the playwright’s intent to “align [the theater] with the moderate Calvinism of the established English church.” Maybe so, but less confessionally charged interests could have been in play. Still, Diehl {  150  } 

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seems to get Angelo right. If Shakespeare had something specific in his sights when he scripted the deputy’s insensitivity and setbacks, the place to look for that “something” is among the puritan extremists, not among the moderates.85 But many moderates were known to have sounded punitive on occasion. Arthur Dent summoned sinners to repentance with censures. “Cursed I was always, cursed I am, and cursed I shall be,” he preached, assuming that Christian “clearing” was inconceivable without Christians cursing. His reason should now be clear to us; “lets and hindrances unto repentance” could not be overcome if one trusted that sins would be pardoned without the sinner’s excruciating self-analysis and self-incrimination. And what made both excruciating was the certainty that even sorrowful sinners would be deservedly punished. His parishioners seem to have replied to Dent’s summons by citing their church attendance, their avoidance of harming others, and their certainty that God would demand no more. Dent’s sermon sees that certainty as a sign that those who hold to it have no “true feeling of religion.” Dutiful puritan preachers, he declares, have an obligation to ensure that their parishioners not remain so insufficiently introspective and self-critical.86 Angelo was introspective—if only irregularly. For all his talk about punishment, however, his inconstancy—and not his implacability— edges him closest to the reformist consensus about sin and salvation. And, as Maurice Hunt now holds, the inconstancy of the duke’s deputy also edges him close to Hamlet. In the second act, Angelo utters what might seem at present to be a throwaway line—“we are all frail” (2.2.121)—yet the Jacobethan playgoers who attended church recognized the sentiment. Hunt claims it as a preview of “the radical frailty” characters in Measure exhibit, to the last act. Their frailty and flaws protrude in every scene and, as puritan preachers pointed out, at every turn in ordinary life.87 Only the duke seems to get by unbruised, although theatergoers might have held him responsible for appointing tyrannical and hypocritical Angelo to rule in his absence. Yet all is well that, ostensibly, ends well, and Vincentio tidies up satisfactorily the messes his deputy makes compromising his honor while, uncompromisingly, trying R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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to enforce an obsolete law. Indeed, Duke Vincentio could be said to have justified on stage the English reformation’s faith in its princes’ piety and discretion. For years, the religiously reformed in the realm argued that their sovereigns had a right and a duty to “intermeddle” to protect the religiously reformed abroad, in France but especially in Holland. Sermons paraded biblical monarchs whose “diligent care” for the confessional contours of their kingdoms was meant to be a model for Jacobethan practice. And, against idolatry and “papistry,” Elizabeth and James were told that they could and should cross borders to assist coreligionists.88 King James disappointed many reformists. He preferred peace to war with Spain, which they regarded as a crusade. To James, they were “pests.” They pressed for interventions abroad that were not uniformly in the realm’s best interests. Conformist bishops were more suitable junior partners, the king believed, and likelier than reformists to keep the religion of his new kingdom as “well setled” as he professed to have found it. Conformists proved to be agreeably deferential, “acknowledg[ing] no other autoritie but it is derived from His Majestie.”89 Duke Vincentio’s last acts in Measure—acts that were penitential rather than penal—granting amnesty without requiring the scorching self-censure that puritan pietists countenanced, may therefore reflect the sentiments of conformists around the new king. The play was first staged soon after his coronation. For the last few paragraphs, without preamble, we have indulged in a version of what literary historian Leah Marcus calls “the game of topicality,” which, if played at the time, would have had Jacobethan playgoers ranging through London’s rogues’ gallery to find the man whom Angelo was meant to represent. “Candidates for resemblance” would have been pretentiously pious, publicly solemn and severe, yet privately scandalous. Not just any puritan would do.90 Playing that “game of topicality” and searching for Duke Vincentio’s look-alike would have been easier then, and seems easy now. King James is a fine candidate. Unlike Elizabeth, who professed to have no interest in peering into her subjects’ souls—the souls of parishioners and pastors alike—and who was relatively unconcerned with theology, James was curious, and Vincentio proved rather prurient onstage. {  152  } 

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Disguised as a friar, he heard confessions; unmasked as the duke, he elicited them. Debora Shuger astutely observes that he “meddles with corrupt consciences and cares intensely about his subjects’ salvation.” The aim of what she describes as his “penitential justice”— and what her colleague Darryl Gless terms “charitable judgment”—was repentance and reclamation, as opposed to the segregation of sinners. Notwithstanding Shuger’s arguments to the contrary, however, a case could be made that the puritan reformists we have encountered were ready to welcome a new king bent on reconciliation and to recoil from an Angelo who was devoted to “penal justice,” deaf to repentance, and dedicated to keeping the goats away from his sheep.91 This is not to suggest that puritans were astoundingly and endlessly tolerant; they were prepared “to cast off” some goats for “manifest ungodlynes.”92 Moreover, puritans approved conformists’ efforts to suppress religious separatism and to keep the separatists’ “schismaticall books” out of circulation.93 Yet most of those puritan reformists believed that conformist church authorities left the job undone. They had not purged the established church’s liturgies of residual Catholicism. Of that the reformists were certain, even as they made “incertitude” the basis of their own initiatives to reform the realm, after the inward turn. Adam Hill preached at St. Paul’s Cross that the righteousness of the religiously reformed always contained elements of uncertainty that, paradoxically, attached to one’s assurance or certainty of election.94 Stephen Greenblatt dubs the result “salutary anxiety,” noticing its centrality for English Calvinists—and, we have added, for Catholic connoisseurs of the prodigal’s “soule wracke.” Peter Lake, with Angelo’s “guilty imaginings” in view, places that uncertainty and anxiety at the center of “the puritan style of subjectivity.” If Lake and Greenblatt are correct—and the soliloquies suggest that they are—“Shakespeare displays the deepest sensitivity to . . . salutary anxiety,” which he “simultaneously questions and assimilates to his own authorial power.”95 Reformists said anxiety promoted humility. Conformists claimed anxiety could also lead to arrogance and spiritual anarchy; the infamous Hacket episode became their chapter and verse, cited repeatedly to document how far, and to what brain-curdling end, self-inculpation R e l i g i o u s P e r s o n a l i t y   { 

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could go. During his brief tenure in London, from arrival to execution, William Hacket went from cursing himself to cursing authorities. He was a spectacle. During the spring and summer of 1591, his shrill and nearly incoherent, “most fearfull imprecations” were acclaimed as “a matter of rare zeal.”96 Leading reformists in the city were importuned by his accomplices to witness him “wildly” hurling insults. Job Throckmorton, a Warwickshire reformist in Parliament, lured to what he later let on was an absurd performance, gave conformist critics grist for their mills. He vividly described Hacket’s eerie expressions of “out ward zeal and ferventnesse,” “stuffed and enterlarded with sundrie bitter” indictments of government and church officials.97 Conformists were sure that Throckmorton and his reformist friends egged on the eccentric, who feigned madness to preach treason.98 Why, conformists asked, had reformists not recognized, early on, “the qualytye and enormyte of [Hacket’s] offense?” His curses and the behavior of the few who immediately fell under his spell seemed preludes to a coup.99 Historians have excavated for—and have found— Hacket’s prior bad acts, which included vandalism, obsessive profanity, and sedition, and which seem to corroborate conformists’ opinion that their more forward colleagues were insufficiently serious about the dangerous mixture of self-deprecation and desperation with which they had been confronted.100 But if leading reformists appear to have been indifferent to the danger of having radicals in their ranks, conformists appear to have overreacted. They frantically tried to find Marprelate and to stop the presses that the martinists operated. Outspoken reformists were rounded up and confined in prisons. Officials collected evidence from the dead as well as from the living. They scratched for notes that puritan impresario John Field, “upon his death bed,” ordered burned.101 The hunt for purportedly, politically subversive reformists was on; conformist Richard Cosin called his prey “the godly affected.” He  wrote at great length about the Hacket “conspiracie,” hoping to guarantee it would be well and long remembered as an embarrassment to reformists. For they were wrong, Cosin stressed, to mix zeal with frailty and to trust that the result was a politically reliable, admirably self-effacing religious personality.102 {  154  } 

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Hacket was Cosin’s premier specimen. He demonstrated the reformists’ folly, although Cosin could have cited in print—and may have cited in conversation—the same mixture and trust that moved reformists to defend prophesying in the 1570s and to insist, through the 1580s and into the 1590s, that a full-scale, finished reformation required frequent preaching to inspire “the zeal of the people.”103 Had Cosin ever taken that tack, Bishop William Overton could have been cast as an exemplary protagonist. Overton dropped in unannounced on a sermon in Warwickshire and saw that the preacher “abated nothing of his zeal and fervency.” “I will cool you,” he swore to that “hot fellow.”104 Overton, Cosin, and other conformist authorities warned “hot,” fervent, and “forward” colleagues not to forget that they were frail or to suppose that candid confessions of their frailty licensed them to issue ultimata to authorities in the established church who looked to prohibit the puritans’ promotion of salutary anxiety (and the consequent reconstructions of the religious personality). Depictions of that anxiety and of the rehabilitations in Shakespeare’s plays do not seem to have been protests against conformist prohibitions or endorsements of reformists’ initiatives and of the prodigal’s “soule wracke.” They do not invalidate Jonathan Bate’s inference that the playwright was “cautious” and “suspicious of change” or perhaps of zeal and affectation, offstage.105 But, onstage, Angelo’s and Hamlet’s “soule wrack” and “salutary anxiety” give us a good look at what many reformists and Jesuits favored—and at what most conformists feared— in the religion around Shakespeare.

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5 religious community

“ F i c k l e C han g e l i ng s” Literary Historian Stephen Greenblatt recently time-traveled to the streets of London and conjured up an “unprecedented concentration of bodies jostling, crossing and recrossing the great bridge, pressing into taverns and theaters and churches.” He suggests that the clutter may be the “key to the whole spectacle” of crowds in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. To be sure, the playwright prowled around Plutarch, Stow, and Holinshed to learn more about “fickle changelings and poor discontents” who nourished passions for “hurleyburly innovation.” But Greenblatt maintains that “the sight of all those people—along with the noise, the smell of their breath, their rowdiness and potential for violence—seems to have been Shakespeare’s first and most enduring impression of the city” in the 1580s, and the impression was inspiration for the “tag-rag” rabble’s “greasy aprons” and “gross diets” in a few plays.1 Perhaps, as Greenblatt insinuates, the grit of fifteenth-century English history and the glory that was Rome were, onstage, “suffused

less with the otherness of the past” than with “the coordinates” of the playwright’s present—specifically, with his contempt for “the sweaty multitude.”2 He knew that mobs were dangerously unpredictable or, like Jack Cade’s crowd in the second part of his Henry VI, just plain dangerous. In the text, Cade stirs his cronies to kill the city’s cultured citizens (4.2), and it might have occurred to Shakespeare that he would have been one of the casualties of the commoners “lightly blown to and fro” (4.8.54–55). Their Roman “cousins,” so to speak, were blown about as well. The proles in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, that is, were easily manipulated. Sinisterly self-interested tribunes swayed the crowd against Rome’s most noble soldier, the darling of affluent, politically influential citizens, and the play’s protagonist. Was Shakespeare warning the Jacobethan aristocracy about anarchy? Was he counseling contemporaries against trusting ordinary citizens or trusting manipulative agitators who led them into trouble? Fifty years ago Brents Stirling believed he was; he believed the playwright “damned” the rabble and ragtag “with tragic thoroughness,” which Stirling attributed to the “climate of public apprehension” created by late Tudor conformist religious literature. It was “clear” to him that Shakespeare attacked “the common mass for excesses of leveling, bungling, and instability” and that the attack “was typical of a conservative position that sought to discredit moderate and extreme dissent.” Conformist critics of nonconformity supplied the recipes. Shakespeare let commoners’ grievances simmer before bringing them to a boil, while playgoers “habitually” (and “unconsciously”) “sensed” that the commoners’ insolence and violent fantasies in the theater substantiated what, offstage, could be heard from many of the city’s pulpits.3 Yet the religious attitudes of conformists and nonconformists alike were vastly more complicated than Stirling assumed. Indeed, the public apprehension he identified signaled an ambivalence that, we shall see, was fundamental to early modern religious reform in England; the “thoroughness” of Shakespeare’s contempt for the crowd is too often overstated, as are his “populism” and his characters’ fondness for or affinities with “the poor discontents.”4 We will begin to make that case with Coriolanus and Coriolanus, the protagonist and play, {  158  } 

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which was composed and performed by 1609. Frank Kermode has noted its “daunting ambiguities,” calling it “probably the most difficult in the canon.”5 Yet the drama’s apparent ambiguity can, in reality, be ambivalence. And Coriolanus looks to be a splendid illustration of the ambivalence toward commoners among the laity in the realm’s religious communities that were just then pondering proposals to redistribute authority and new ways to maintain exemplary discipline.

Cori ol an u s , “Neve r a Worthi e r M an” Shakespeare sometimes has Coriolanus struggle to control his disdain for Rome’s proles, yet the protagonist simply cannot keep it in the vault. He thinks that hard times turn commoners into “dissentious rogues” (1.1.162) and that war turns them into cowards, “souls of geese that bear the shapes of men” (1.4.34–35). But he is their contrary; his valor and the contempt for ordinary citizens, which he shares with fellow patricians, make him the senate’s choice for consul. Yet Rome had become a republic, so the senate’s nominee would have to get the crowd’s consent. Simple enough, save that Coriolanus put himself above pandering to commoners. As for those ordinary citizens, onstage, they are not at first opposed to approving the nomination of the city’s latest hero, but before endorsing his selection as consul, they want to inspect his scars, the marks of his heroism. The changes in procedures and in the capital’s political climate, however, have not registered with Coriolanus. Besides, his wounds, he says, “smart to hear themselves rememb’red” (1.9.28–29). His mother, patrician and senator Menenius, and other partisans of his candidacy call for calm and condescension. And Coriolanus appears to acquiesce and to move within striking distance of being acclaimed by the citizens—until electioneering brings out his arrogance. He is dismissive and not submissive. He cannot help himself; he offends “the mutable, rank-scented meinie,” or menials, whom he was obliged to flatter (3.1.66). Their elected representatives, tribunes Brutus and Sicinius, remind them, at the start of the play, that Coriolanus had urged the R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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rejection of the proles’ petition for surplus corn at low prices.6 The two intimate that, as consul, Coriolanus would unlikely drop his resolute opposition to the commoners’ causes—and to the new republic’s participatory regime. To get their votes or voices, he might maneuver adroitly, the tribunes caution, although Shakespeare’s text has their antagonist stumble awkwardly. Still, Coriolanus was incapable of concealing that he deplored Rome’s new political arrangements in which “gentry, title, [and] wisdom cannot conclude but by the yea and no of general ignorance.” The tribunes egg him on. He is impolitic, complaining that governments by the people “omit real necessities and give way the while to unstable slightness” (3.1.144–48) Brutus’s and Sicinius’s “dishonor mangles true judgment,” Coriolanus says, nodding as well to the people’s “dishonor.” Participatory government, he keeps on, to his disadvantage, “bereaves the state of that integrity which should become ’t, not having the power to do the good it would, for the ill which doth control ’t” (157–64). The commoners, predictably, are offended and frightened. They banish Coriolanus from the city he ably defended, and he leaves with one last slap, ripping what is left of the veil from his contempt: “Common cry of curs, whose breath I hate . . . I banish you” (3.3.120–24). “Being now in no request of his country” (4.3.35–36), Coriolanus goes over to Rome’s enemies. He leads the Volscians, whose city he sacked, almost single-handedly, a short time before, to the walls of his own city. He is reluctant to let the Romans off; they had, after all, humiliated him, yet he spares them when his mother and wife, appealing to his nobility, beg for mercy. The Volscians also acknowledge Coriolanus’s nobility when they slay him for betraying them (5.4). Even the citizens of Rome conceded his nobility when they thwarted his candidacy for consul. If nearly everyone within the play agreed about his virtue, what did playgoers make of his disdain? Would so noble a soldier lie about the new republic’s “curs,” “scabs,” “shreds,” “rats,” “mechanics,” and the “despised, fragmented carnality of the mass”? Was Coriolanus a warning against leveling, as literary historians now suggest, a warning against the English laity’s “unstable slightness”?7 Had Shakespeare’s protagonist, railing against the “scabs” and “shreds” in his army and city, gazed at the groundlings gazing at him {  160  } 

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onstage and commented on the controversies about religious community with which London’s playgoers were well acquainted, he might have echoed what they frequently heard conformists and reformists attribute to critics of reformed religion—specifically, that “it was never good world since everie souldier and every servingman could talk so much of the scripture.” “It was never good world with us priests,” reformist Anthony Gilby has an abrasive chaplain declare, in effect making contempt for the commoners contemptibly Catholic.8 Yet there was some sense in the fictional chaplain’s sensitivity. Religious reformers in the realm had held for nearly two centuries that “a worthy, grave man” need not be a priest to pronounce on the Bible’s meaning. The more “forward” or radical reformists appeared ready to risk a de facto priesthood of all believers. Agreed, disappointingly few proles were learned, and learning was highly prized among the articulate reformed theorists. But zeal “was the most precious virtue in Christianity,” Richard Greenham alleged, “so long as it is free from extremities.”9 Coriolanus’s zeal was not “free from extremities.” As the tribunes noted, he intemperately spoke “o’ the people as if [he] were a god to punish [them], not a man of their infirmity” (3.1.80–82). Cathy Shrank aptly calls him “a portrait of uncivility.”10 Menenius and other patricians were learning to accommodate “the rhetoric of participation” in their new Roman republic. Not Coriolanus! His obstinacy on that count could very well have annoyed patrons of the theaters, who would not have been shocked by the lesson that he learned at great cost—that no noble was indispensable. History, as they heard it from the London pulpits, read it in chronicles, and saw it onstage, divulged as much. Nonetheless, Coriolanus’s snarling self-importance and insulting condescension, grating as they might have seemed, no more delegitimized what he said about the commoners than his undisputed courage and candor (“His nature is too noble for the world,” 255) validated his insults. Still, several scholars emphasize the protagonist’s flaws and fate, suggesting that Shakespeare “encouraged” playgoers’ support for “plebeians’ wishes” for greater participation, for shares in the government of their cities and religious communities.11 Annabel Patterson’s interpretation strides toward that suggestion but starts by taking stock of the playgoers. The theater crowd was a R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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mixed lot, “a jumble of classes,” she notices; commoners rubbed elbows with the affluent and aristocratic. The theater, therefore, “spoke to democratic ideals” before anyone came onstage.12 The first to appear in Coriolanus were “mutinous citizens” protesting the inflated price of corn. Protestors in Peter Hall’s 1980s London production mingled with the audience. They invited playgoers to join them onstage, leisurely distributing placards before the first lines were delivered. The citizen-chorus was not supplied costumes. Actors were told to bring casual clothes from their homes to get playgoers to identify with them—and with their dissent.13 Might the crowd in Coriolanus have in some way beckoned early seventeenth-century playgoers? Its resistance to protagonist and patricians alike may have made power sharing seem attractive. Surely, the play made broadly participatory alternatives to Jacobethan absolutism and to the concentration of power in the church “visible and accessible.”14 The crowd surges more menacingly during the fourth act of 2 Henry VI. Commoners—in effect, if not in their creator’s intention— enacted the prole protest that was featured in socially conservative and religiously conformist propaganda. Conformists feared that radical reformists were waiting only for a resourceful leader to rally them and to specify which cherished religious or political institutions should be flattened first. The playwright’s nominee, Jack Cade, was the clothier from Kent, whose abortive insurgency in the fifteenth century would have been familiar to playgoers, thanks largely to the realm’s chroniclers. Cade proposed to level all that got in his way. In 2 Henry VI, most of the material grievances of the commoners in his makeshift army are unindexed. The ordinary people—sometimes gawky, although often as outrageously assertive as their leader—are angry onstage because they were getting bad press. Their reputation as sturdy sorts and staples of the economy was unraveling: “O Miserable age,” one of Cade’s crew mourns, “virtue is not regarded in handicraftsmen” (4.2.10–11). Yet their captain stirs them to a murderous frenzy by promising better beer. At times, with certain lines, he and they relish opportunities to destroy. But Cade appears to aspire to more. He claims to have made his “mouth the Parliament of England” (4.7.12–13). The crowd, however, abandons him when they hear of incentives better than beer in a {  162  } 

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more compelling oration. Shakespeare’s commoners—those populating 2 Henry VI, at least—were variable as well as brutal (4.7–8).15 Ordinary people are more reflective and self-critical in Coriolanus. They worry about “mak[ing] a monster of the multitude by showing ingratitude” (2.3.9–11): if only he would “incline to the people, there was never a worthier man” than Coriolanus (38–39). Indeed, the proles onstage were friendly at first, magnanimous until the tribunes turn reservations into rage (3.2), and they work awfully hard to get that done. The middling sort in Coriolanus’s Rome and in Shakespeare’s London “do not cease to negotiate,” Theodore Leinwand now says; “this is not one of those Shakespearean moments when we stand apart from the lower orders, laughing at their malapropisms” or praying, as  one might after encountering Cade’s kind, that local officials acquire some “comprehensive disciplinary control of popular energy.”16 Perhaps the playwright wanted audiences to leave the theater unafraid of “popular energy.” In his Coriolanus, he staged the “mutiny” very differently from Plutarch, who sketched the crowd’s “hate and malice.” Both, Plutarch alleged, grew with minimal prompting until the proles “were in wonderful fury.” Only then did Brutus and Sicinius capitalize on their constituents’ reaction to Coriolanus’s “soaring insolence” to ensure the rejection of his candidacy for consul.17 In Shakespeare’s play, however, the commoners never forget who the hero of the drama is. Not they but the tribunes are the villains goading the crowd and Coriolanus, to no good end—simply, selfishly to preserve their own political influence. The tribunes remind “the people in what hatred [Coriolanus] still hath held them” (2.1.245– 46), then cover their tracks and tell the patricians how earnestly they had tried to get the citizens to acquiesce in his political promotion (2.1–3). The playgoers surely perceived what, onstage, sage Menenius and the rest of the senate doubtlessly suspect, that the tribunes utterly undermined the proles’ goodwill. So whose reputation did the script scuttle? That of Coriolanus, hero-turned-victim? That of the crowd? Or that of the tribunes? Literary historian R. W. Chambers was certain that “Shakespeare hated and despised the tribunes in Coriolanus with a bitterness he rarely felt towards any of his creatures.”18 Yet Brutus and Sicinius R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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only point out the obvious, reminding Roman proles that Coriolanus “did solicit you in free contempt” (2.3.198). True, those two tribunes were luminously self-interested, anticipating that when their city’s soldier-hero assumed authority as consul, their “office” would “go [to] sleep” (2.1.222–23). And would they not have been derelict to underestimate his desire to take power from the people? What the tribunes called his “soaring insolence” (254), according to Leonard Tennenhouse, made Coriolanus “the ultimate conservative.”19 His “monumental narcissism,” Leah Marcus suggests, was a clear and present danger to the emergent republicanism that Brutus and Sicinius were determined to safeguard.20 They therefore connived at his dreadful fate (“i’ the people’s name,” 3.3.99) to save the people and their recently acquired rights from a man who was demonstrably better at waging a war than at working a crowd. Once Coriolanus had been banished, commoners enjoyed “peace and quietness.” Rome’s tradesmen rejoiced, “going about their functions, friendly.” Patricians grew “most kind” (4.6.2– 11). The tribunes were every bit as disingenuous as the drama neared its denouement—“we wished Coriolanus had loved you [the citizens] as we did” (23–24)—although, as the playwright put it, “Rome sits safe and still without him” (37). To draw a lesson from Rome’s safety, however, is quite difficult. The play leaves playgoers (and interpreters) with dilemmas, not with defensibly categorical conclusions about the ingratitude of the “tag-rag” rabble of the city, the wickedness of their tribunes, and the incorrigibility of a would-have-been consul. Yet, insofar as being baffled did not bother the patrons of the theater—and William Empson guesses that it did not—Coriolanus was a fine way to pass the time.21 But were early modern plays more than just pastimes? Might Coriolanus have been a brief for crowd control? (Propaganda punctuated entertainment, scholars now say, yet the point of propaganda surely was not to baffle.) Literary historians look for political purposes in plays—for topical references that help them situate playwrights and performances among other “players” in political and religious controversies of the time—and we should watch them for a while to learn how they frame questions and formulate answers before this last {  164  } 

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chapter strikes out on its own to discuss whether the crowd in Coriolanus was meant to be—and was seen to be—more dangerous than the play’s protagonist. Crowd control was quite topical. London magistrates and in-​the-​ know assize judges elsewhere were anxious about what now passes in historical literature as “the epidemic of disorder” during the late Elizabethan period. Living standards in London reached “a low point,” Chris Fitter says, sifting evidence for economic downturns that displaced commoners from the 1590s.22 Crop failures and crime rates warned authorities of a coming crisis. To an extent, of course, rural “stirs” and urban disturbances were cottagers’ and tradesmen’s “negotiating strategies.”23 But sensible magistrates were obliged to anticipate that protests would turn into emergencies. In 1603, their new king worried as well. He was unhappy having dissidents speak out or act out, and his displeasure with those who did was widely known. He called “populists” “tribunes,” referring to members of Parliament who suggested alternatives to the quite modest relief measures that officials implemented. Perhaps Coriolanus’s swift kicks at the representatives of Rome’s “rats,” “scabs,” and “curs” reflected James’s annoyance with those who spoke too exuberantly on behalf of his “immiserated” subjects. And if Shannon Miller is right, playgoers saw similarities between their new sovereign’s annoyance and the arrogance of Shakespeare’s would-be consul. The latter’s staged dislike of public displays may have reminded audiences of James’s aversion to public appearances that were part of the pageant of Jacobethan politics. The king was known to have cut short his coronation, attempting as Coriolanus did to “o’erleap that custom” or ritual requiring him to go among the commoners (2.2.136). For both Coriolanus and James, the people’s curiosity was an ordeal. Nonetheless, even if playgoers caught the resemblances between the two, they could have stopped shy of Miller’s conclusion, failing to catch the playwright advocating resistance to absolutism.24 Yet there was resistance in London. The city’s magistrates asked for a new charter that would disallow royal interference, and it was granted by 1608, before Coriolanus debuted. The royal concession came after municipal officials scuffled with king’s marshals claiming R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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superior jurisdiction over certain crimes, and reading Shakespeare’s play in light of that scuffle—looking for “a language of civic liberties and francises”—is what Leah Marcus aptly calls reading (and looking) “locally.” Marcus has a keen eye for the play’s “topical reverberations” with jurisdictional battles in early modern London and spots nothing that passes as an endorsement of Rome’s “turbulent republican system.” In the text and onstage, the city is the winner, not its commoners, who, she says, “display little of the steadfastness and civility they need” to nominate worthy tribunes and guard cherished customs. “The city dominates the stage”; popular protest reflects “clamor for the preservation of local autonomy” in Shakespeare’s place and time.25 Yet such sorting of “topical reverberations” leaves the play in the strange position of appearing to celebrate Jacobethan commoners’ “clamor” for autonomy while doubting their abilities to manage it. Or are we mistaken to think that strange? One early modern proposal setting strategies for social reform argued that greater power should be given to locals, despite their incompetence; without interrupting its withering account of local political blundering, the “plot,” as it was called, plumped for decentralization as it relentlessly scored against the conceit that expert butchers or acclaimed bakers and vintners made smart magistrates. How silly to be so fastidiously selective in stabling one’s horses with good grooms, while trusting one’s laws to the untrained!26 Did Jacobethan playgoers sense that Coriolanus expressed similar reservations about those who ruled the realm’s cities and perhaps about the more significant others who frequented the Court and Council and who ruled the realm itself? Or were those playgoers unlikely to be tipped against either Coriolanus or their king, understanding that entertainments either “spoke to James’s interests” or were denied a stage? Early seventeenth-century censors would have ensured that performances of Coriolanus were “conservative in tendency,” Clifford Huffman infers; they would have seen to it that players illustrated the stupidity of citizens, the duplicity of tribunes, and, above all, the impracticality of challenging divine-right rule. If Huffman is correct, Coriolanus was—and was taken to have been—a dramatization of the Tudor Homily on Obedience.27 {  166  } 

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Or was the drama indifferent, apolitical? Censors might well have let something that seemed nonpartisan pass, so topical references to James settle nothing conclusively. And what seemed harmless to censors could have stirred others. We cannot tell for sure whether playgoers who recognized their king in Coriolanus cheered the crowd opposing him, jeered, or cared nothing at all about the indignation and popular protests onstage. Yet what if playgoers glimpsed something else of England, something other than the Crown’s initiatives stymied by London mobs or the new king’s disinclination to look kindly on Parliament when the “tribunes” there advocated commoners’ causes? Shakespeare, as it happens, played a bit with Plutarch, whose mob, at first, had objected to greedy creditors. The crowd in Coriolanus is hungry. The citizens want “corn at their own rates.” They say that the city is “well stored” (1.1.188–89). The script mentions usury but attributes the swells of sedition to the Romans’ sense that the senate was withholding the surplus to drive up prices. Allusions to late Elizabethan and early Jacobean shortages, hoarding, the enclosure of arable land, and widespread hunger and anger might have been achingly obvious to any playgoer who knew history—specifically, the stories and woes of discontented peasants who squared off against landlords for generations. Dwelling in or around London did not preclude one from knowing and caring—as a customer—that the frequency and intensity of agrarian conflicts, notably in the Midlands, had tremendously increased since the 1580s. The complainants often converged on specific sites to riot against neighbors whom they blamed for low yields, high unemployment, or inflated prices. Earthen embankments and thick shrubbery enclosing pastures were the first casualties, although the frustrations did lead to “cutting down gentlemen rather than their hedges.”28 Late Tudor rural riots may have slowed—yet they did not stop— enclosures, which outraged commoners well into the 1600s. The Midlands revolt in 1607, two years before Coriolanus was first staged, started in Northamptonshire, where the proles were worsted in late spring, yet that result did not deter dissidents in Oxfordshire and Worcestershire, even closer to Shakespeare’s Stratford. The playwright spent most of his time in London, although, as one of the R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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leading cornholders in his home county, he must have anxiously watched the developments there.29 If the crowd in Coriolanus reflects (or refers to)  the stirs in the Midlands, however, the few moments in which commoners onstage seem to disarm playgoers with their self-deprecation and goodwill (2.3) are all the more remarkable, for the playwright’s investments in corn ought to have kept him in the patricians’ corner and should have led him to endorse Coriolanus’s counsel more emphatically: capitulating to commoners “nourish’d disobedience [and] fed the ruin of the state” (3.1.117–18). And, on this reading of the play, wherein the Jacobethan agrarian context—often amputated—has been restored, the view that Shakespeare’s “artist nerves” alone account for his “aversion to the mob” has been displaced by one that underscores economic self-preservation. Still, Richard Wilson’s canny reconstruction of the playwright’s business interests, while making it hard to swallow the idea that his contempt for the crowd was predominantly aristocratic and aesthetic, also drops the topical conceit that the stirs of 1607 “reverberate” onstage in 1608. Instead, Wilson has Coriolanus reflect earlier grievances and turmoil. For Shakespeare was not just another Stratford cornholder; he had occasion to represent Warwickshire agribusiness when he was in London in the 1590s. The local commodity traders relied on him to make their case against quick consumption, so, Wilson thinks, Coriolanus, on cue, opposes citizens agitating for precisely that. But Wilson also notices that the play is much kinder to commoners than the playwright’s Stratford friends and fellow profiteers would have wanted, had they not feared (and had Shakespeare not opposed, on their behalf) some “unregulated counter-market.” The crowd in Coriolanus is “presented so equivocally,” therefore, because local traders— notably maltsters and brewers—were more or less in league with commoner consumers, Wilson says, to keep middlemen elsewhere from putting the local corn exchange out of business by siphoning off supply.30 Perhaps the play contains the coded market analysis that Wilson claims to have cracked. Possibly it yields information about other sources of socioeconomic strife, relaying something as well about the religion around Shakespeare—specifically, about the strife occasioned {  168  } 

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by petitions that “anie man” be afforded the right to redress injury by appealing local judgments against the church’s critics to church councils.31 “Anie man,” in this application, was not a mob, of course, and Shakespeare’s admiration for commoners’ common sense, such as it was, might not have survived the “unstable slightness” and unruly collective behavior he witnessed or heard about. We can only guess, but from what we now know, it seems reasonable to conclude that, for Shakespeare, neither that admiration nor the vexation that mark Coriolanus’s indictments of “rank-scented” “curs” and “scabs” developed into a consistent, coherent position on crowd control. Maybe the topical references aimed less at social relevance than at dramatic effect. Might the playwright have been trying his hand at “daring social analysis”?32 Or was he creating “immediacy” by referring obliquely to a current crisis for playgoers who preferred artistic methods that added a dash of familiar English rebelliousness to republican Rome?33

“ L i v e l i e ” L ayme n and “ Facti ous P r act ice” Early sixteenth-century rebellions on the Continent soured Martin Luther on the prospects for local and lay autonomy. To 1523, he figured that ordinary people might make fundamentally correct choices about doctrine and discipline. Parishioners should be able to select their pastors.34 But when Swiss and German peasants took up arms against their princes, Luther lost faith in the reformed faithful. It seemed implausible to him thereafter that religious reform could promptly restore reason to a laity that was so long afflicted by superstition. What has become known as peasants’ wars convinced him that one old saw still cut: ubi enim tyranni desunt, tyrannizant populi—people tend to tyrannize when there are no tyrants ruling them.35 John Calvin fondly misremembered a time when bishops “put in execution” whatever was “decreed by common counsell.” Roman Catholicism, he grieved, replaced that arrangement with another, which served self-interested episcopal and papal officials. Nonetheless, he did not countenance distributing authority too broadly. He was dismissive of colleagues who trusted that ordinary Christians R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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could participate influentially and usefully in reformed regimes.36 Such trust persisted, however; a number of Calvinists advocated that reformed congregations give counsels (consistories), composed of lay and clerical members, power to appoint leaders and monitor their conduct. In the late 1540s, the English were exposed to participatory parish regimes of that kind when refugees from Germany, France, and Flanders crossed the Channel. The “strangers” were allowed to govern their congregations as they had before military and political setbacks drove them into exile. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was favorably impressed by provisions that the refugees made for parishioners’ review of candidates for the ministry but was understandably reluctant to implement changes in the English church that could be seen as a challenge to the realm’s bishops’ prerogatives and lay proprietors’ privileges.37 Many refugees returned to the Continent when and where affairs settled at mid-century, yet others arrived in England in the early 1570s, fleeing Valois and Hapsburg persecutors. The new strangers found themselves marooned on a more or less friendly island. They learned that conformists opposed the establishment of parish consistories, their own and those commended by their English reformist friends, one of whom, Thomas Wilcox, often drew fire for supporting participatory parish government. But Wilcox did not flinch. In 1581, he  translated and published a treatise that argued for commoners’ influence in church management, for ensuring “the plaine and expresse consent of the people” for every parish personnel and disciplinary decision.38 Soon afterward, readers could find in the stalls at St. Paul’s a Declaration against “the untrue principle that uniformitie must be in all places enforced by [the] magistrate,” a treatise that, in effect, proposed putting worship to a vote. So local variations—“most meete for diverse places”—were invited and even encouraged; parishioners could approve deviations from the prevailing norms. The only condition was that some “overseers” and “elders” be deputized to see that any innovation was “profitable for all.”39 To avoid prolonged deliberations about relatively insignificant matters, other reformists specified that overseers and elders should confer with their congregations only about “cases of greater weight.”40 {  170  } 

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Some of those others, however, apparently agreed with the Declaration, stipulating that parish delegates present would-be pastors to parishioners, who, after their interrogation of candidates, would return a final decision to appoint or reject. The protocol resembled that in Coriolanus, although, predictably, the precedent cited by the Declaration was scriptural—the practices of the apostle Paul rather than the reports filed by Plutarch. The anonymous authors of the Declaration admitted the risks. Commoners might not select candidates “reasonabl[y].” The elders or overseers trying for consensus might provoke consensus. Alternatives, however, were altogether unwelcome; to give a single proprietor, lay or ecclesiastical, the authority to select or reject was, in effect, to move “a multitude of unfitte pastours” to “pro[w]ll where they can for their benefices,” flattering patrons or, even worse, bribing them for choice appointments. The Declaration insists that parishioners can learn to discern in candidates virtues “meete” for the ministry—learning, modesty, and gravity.41 The Declaration put faith in the faithful, much as Edward Dering did a decade earlier. When conformists accused him of preaching disobedience, Dering asked to have his sermons “judged by the hearers”— an appeal that showed disrespect for his accusers’ authority. But what Dering presumed—and what reformists expected—was that regeneration came with reformation, and with regeneration came understanding.42 They knew it would not come easily. They knew that hypocrisy was hard to detect and that temptations to lie for power were difficult for the ambitious to overcome. Clever candidates for clerical leadership might play on parishioners’ self-interest, and parishioners, looking for quick fixes—for ways to assuage their guilt and to reassure themselves of election—were ready to believe overly generous assessments of their characters and conduct. What might keep reformist pastors, who were eager for parishioners’ approval, from hawking specious consolations? To John Calvin, it was critical that commoners be consoled by the good news that the God who must justly punish them would also mercifully forgive them. They needed no priest to hear their confessions, test their contrition, assign them penances, and present the sacrament at communion as if regular reenactments of Christ’s singular sacrifice on the cross were necessary to seal his R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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triumph over sin and error. Yet adversity could make a muddle of all that the gospel and its good news had achieved. The faithful could start to doubt God’s mercy and forgiveness. Still, in  Calvin’s judgment, truly reformed Christians would call themselves “back to patience.”43 And to Jacobethan reformists, the by-products of that “recall” were obvious: ministers, magistrates, and “private m[e]n” should “be able to saie” at life’s end, “I am cleane and pure and maie wash my hand in innocency from all manner of deceit and wrong-dealing.”44 Reformists advocating broadly participatory parish regimes were willing to trust the laity, recalled and making ready for that end. They did not underestimate problems that the laity was likely to encounter while remaining patient. Richard Greenham acknowledged that a Christian’s life would always be spiked with anxiety. “The conflict which we finde and feele in ourselves,” he counseled, was not a sign of sinfulness and irredeemable estrangement from God. Disquiet was the sure sign of one’s sanctification—the right kind of disquiet and “conflict,” that is, which Greenham, for twenty years near Cambridge and thereafter in London, tried to inspire from his pulpits, as he explained how inner turmoil built spiritual strength.45 Greenham’s strategy was not atypical. Pulpits were critical for reformists. Edmund Grindal could hardly have been more concise: the “public and continual preaching of God’s word is the ordinary mean and instrument of the salvation of mankind.” Presiding consecutively over three sees—London, York, and Canterbury—he put procuring “able and sufficient” preachers at the top of his to-do lists. He screened candidates scrupulously, “admit[ting] no man [who] professeth papistry or puritanism.”46 He shared puritans’ sense that pulpits were of paramount importance for the improvement of lay piety. Sermons trained commoners; it was that simple, for Grindal and the puritans, yet he objected to their “highly selective” use of the established church’s Book of Common Prayer. Their nonconformity was an insult to their bishops—his colleagues—some of whom, unlike him, preferred scripted, officially sanctioned homilies to sermons.47 Grindal was as indignant as leading reformist preachers when their queen and her Council tried to suppress the public exercises called “prophecies,” during which multiple sermons were delivered {  172  } 

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on market days. Elizabeth’s suggestion that England could do with fewer sermons demonstrated, to Grindal, her imperfect comprehension of what remained to be done to complete the realm’s religious reformation. “Nothing,” he told her, can “beateth down popery more than ministers [who] grow to such good knowledge” by participating in a round of sermons and by contributing to the collective self-criticism that followed. Moreover, the “good knowledge” packed into subsequent sermons in participants’ home parishes brought ordinary people closer to the “certaintie and full persuasion” that their “synnes are forgiven,” a certainty reformers set as a goal at the very start of the queen’s reign. Had political authorities forgotten? It seemed so to Grindal when queen and regime censured and censored prophesying. He dared, therefore, to scold his sovereign: “Remember madam,” he wrote, “you are a mortal creature . . . dust and ashes” beneath “purple and princely array.”48 Grindal’s daring cost him dearly. He lost influence at Court. He had not advocated broad popular participation in the prophecies but was determined to rescue them, because they allowed preachers to improve their skills.49 Grindal was not explicit about consequent improvements in lay comprehension or piety; Eusebius Paget was. He conceded that the vast sea of reformed religious doctrine could not be poured into laymen’s “little dish[es] of wit.” He set different standards for his sermons’ success. They must urge the faithful to “full persuasion” and have them “feele in their hartes” that they were saved.50 Paget might have thought that such success would lead to greater lay and local control over parish life. Grindal did not. He saw “no reason why the people shulde bee excludett” from edifying exercises yet took no initiative to have them any more meaningfully included in parish government than were churchwardens. Maybe he was as skeptical about ordinary parishioners’ readiness to assume significant responsibilities.51 On this count, should we number Grindal among conformists who presumed that commoners lacked discrimination and were drawn to “meanly qualify’d” ministers whose “wild tongues” entertained them?52 Shakespeare may have been thinking of Jacobethan preaching and of the conformists’ criticisms of reformists who overvalued sermons’ R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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effects when he had Coriolanus mention that plebeians retained little of what they heard from the pulpits, showing that their “little dish[es] of wit” were more sieve-like than leak-proof. For the controversies about preachers’ hold over the laity continued long after Elizabeth ordered prophesying suppressed. To Welsh reformist John Penry, bishops bore responsibility for ordinary persons’ poor and patchwork comprehension of reformed religious truths. Tongue in cheek, he told members of Parliament in the late 1580s that bishops were “fit” leaders, “whensoever opportunitie shall serve, to bringe the people againe into Egypt.”53 “Egypt,” here, was ignorance and idolatry. Penry deplored what he believed to be the prelates’ conspiracy to keep commoners ignorant, as “ignorant” and “slight” as Coriolanus later found them onstage, and to plump up English churches with Catholic ceremonies, readying them, should invasion or royal succession return the realm to Rome. Penry pulled no punches; bishops, he said, “butchered” the church. They thrust earnest, gifted, nonconformist preachers from their pulpits and appointed indolent pluralists and irresponsible nonresidents. He might have made Grindal an exception; he did praise Hugh Latimer and John Hooper, earlier Tudor evangelists-turned-bishops-turned-martyrs, who had “labored by all meanes possible to put life into [their church] by preaching the word.” Yet he let prelates know that, were he to rerun the English reformation, he would run off all the bishops at the start.54 Anthony Gilby, who declined to become a bishop, implied that religiously reformed diocesan administrators had fallen asleep at the switch. More than forty years had passed since “poperie hath been written and spoken against,” he noted in 1581, yet “men be not yet confirmed in the knowledge of Christ.” There was a good chance that a learned ministry and, as a result, an impressively regenerate laity would grace the realm, Gilby ventured, if bishops ceased depriving dissident, worthy preachers whose only crime was to press for the decontamination of reformed religion. He specifically wanted to be free of “garishe geare,” vestments that reminded him of Catholic worship: “Where the weedes of poperie are utterlie abolished,” “all thinges procede more livelie, both in fayth and in manners.”55

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But “livelie” laymen in late Tudor and early Stuart England appear to have been widely resented and sometimes feared by authorities who cared more for order than for vitality, which could carry the zealous beyond the pale, making them “over precise” and “over holy,” too “busie in checking every man.” Nonliterary evidence does not permit historians to say with confidence whether there were “so manie [such] scripture men” or “busie” meddlers as conformist critics claimed, but the protagonists in narratives composed to answer that criticism were those commoners willing and eager to “speak godliness.”56 They were ordinary people with the nerve to pronounce on matters of public interest, much as Plutarch’s proles resettled in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Reformist George Gifford, for one, did not shy from featuring lay contributions to the reeducation of the laity. He  anticipated a chilly climate; commoners’ resistance and resentments get expressed in his dialogues, which match thick-headed laymen against nimble colleagues, aiming to convert them. Gifford, one of several Essex preachers who were occasionally in trouble with diocesan authorities, made sure that his fictional lay fellows stayed well “within the limits of their calling.” He did not want to be confused with separatists, so fond of “anabaptisticall freedom” that they bolted from the realm’s established church. He wrote of the religious separatists’ “intollerable pride and presumption,” which led them to assail pastors rather than impiety.57 Zealot, the protagonist in Gifford’s best-known treatise, arraigns “the remnant of sin that did abide” inside all Christians, even puritan partisans. He is zealous for the sinner’s and the church’s rehabilitation but not against the clergy. Had Gifford’s vanguard of lay “meddlers” ever been put into play, “drowsy” parishioners would have been the principal targets. Zealot’s objective was simply to awaken and persuade them to “delight and desire . . . the good.”58 Legions of competent pastors might have helped, but depriving Catholic priests depleted the ministry at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, and culling nonconformist preachers predictably had similar consequences for the next few decades. Gifford maintained that the depletion left commoners “like naked men,” stripped by statute of

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their Catholicism, “ready for any coate almost that may be put upon them.” The shame was that reformist pastors and preachers could not reach everyone with the right “coate.” Hence, the realm’s reformation was unstable. But it is hard to tell if Gifford’s literate lay consultants, so well armed with arguments, were his solution to problems caused by the “naked,” complacent, or “drowsy” Christians who enjoyed the world too much, hated “over holy” “meddlers,” and “arme[d] themselves against true repentance.”59 Arthur Dent also used a lay protagonist to alert an interlocutor (and readers) to the consequences of scorning “true godliness,” which, Dent said, was widely “despised” and “loathed.” “We are become impudent in sinne . . . almost past shame and past grace,” he observed, echoing the Old Testament’s prophets of doom—“this house shall be waste”— and insisting that England had “great cause to mourne and lament, to quake and tremble.”60 Dent, however, was not ready to evacuate, despite his panicked sense that the realm was in jeopardy; his plan was to pave a “path-way” for complacent commoners, and both plan and pathway exhibited his fundamental trust in ordinary people. With the right guidance, they could possess the “full persuasion” of God’s infinite mercy. Hence, Dent’s criticism of their neglect of “true repentance” and his forecast of dreadful, divine retribution were just the beginning. They were meant to place readers on his “path-way.” Once en route, “cheerfull[y]” obedient to God, they grew certain of receiving eternal reward. The difference between their course—Dent’s path— and the thoroughfare traveled by Catholics seemed to him worth mentioning often: he remarked that Rome’s power and prestige depended on keeping ordinary Christians in doubt about the amplitude of God’s mercy. But the reformed Christians on his course discovered their “exaltation” in Christ’s humiliation. To call that discovery both socially and politically empowering may be overreaching, but to think of it as socially and ecclesially insignificant would be a mistake.61 It was a mistake that conformists did not make, because they were wary of reformists’ rhetoric of regeneration. They heard Dent commend both obedience and “exaltation,” yet his and other reformists’ emphasis on the latter was certain to complicate any effort to enforce the former. Conformist Matthew Sutcliffe feared that a lively laity {  176  } 

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would prefer “innovations,” the “dangerous effects” of which could only be detrimental to diocesan authority. Several reformist critics of episcopacy already proposed local autonomy. Sutcliffe could see that a parish court or consistory, here or there, might monitor mischief and achieve a fair amount of discipline within congregations, but who was to umpire when parishioners from different parishes turned on one another? Sutcliffe was unimpressed by presbyterian reformists’ plans for regional synods and by their faith in conferees’ predilections for consensus. He did not try to conceal his contempt for such naiveté. Lay and local control, he explained, ran the risk of destroying churches, an altogether too conceivable result of power sharing from the conformists’ perspective.62 Whitgift remembered that there were “stir[s] and sedition” whenever proles participated in church government. The streets in fourth-century Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome had been streaked with blood, he believed, when plebeians got involved in parish elections. He conjured an England in that condition and recoiled. Only English bishops, he concluded, would save Elizabeth’s religious settlement and her realm’s established churches from the advocates of consistories and the “multitude of [their] lewd complices.”63 To Whitgift’s friend and patron Christopher Hatton, the presbyterians’ “platforme” was a perfect example of “factious practice.” Reformist experiments with parish and diocesan government were wholly unwelcome, as was the criticism of what they were designed to replace. And the critics, for reasons unrelated to the church’s well-being—for their “own glorie and wealth,” Hatton said—conspired to “snare” the queen’s religiously reformed subjects and to have them turn on conformists—and on everyone in authority in England.64 Dudley Fenner, complaining about the conformists’ earlier verbal fireworks, argued that their assessments of “factious practice” totally missed the presbyterians’ point. He insisted that parish elders were in place to control crowds, not to incite them. Even if he conceded Whitgift’s point about “stir[s] and sedition” in late antiquity, that history of conflict had no bearing on the reevaluation of early modern parish participation in England, which—unlike late fourth-century Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome—boasted a reformed church. Commoners R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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could be trusted to act responsibly. Besides, scripture trumped tradition: Paul’s correspondence and the biblical account of Peter’s political behavior proved that those apostles “accept[ed], in some maner, the people to speake and authorise their determinations.” Peter’s and Paul’s leadership was effective, Fenner concluded, because they often “yeelded to the challenge of some not so well instructed” and unfailingly gave ordinary Christians the satisfaction of an answer as questions and objections were raised.65 Reformists, then, argued that the regenerated laity in their realm could reach consensus without risking chaos. Religiously reformed commoners learned their limits and sought counsel from pastors and presbyters, who were exceptionally dedicated, competent guides. They saw to it, for example, that parishioners did not become greedy when parishes received large bequests. Persuaded that “the more a man should give away from himselfe, the more he should inrich himselfe,” parishioners set general policy and let church revenues be “distributed at the discretion” of their elected wardens. That seemed workable, and sometimes worked.66 Nonetheless, conformists fretted about the guidance parishioners were getting from the reformists who insulted their bishops and agitated for a “senate of elders” in each parish. Conceivably, the bid for local and lay control was an arresting yet disingenuous attempt to usurp power from diocesan executives and surrender it to self-serving parish elites to whom reformists pandered. Conformists suspected that susceptible commoners might be unable to perceive that their pastors and presbyters were politically and selfishly motivated.67 Parishioners were gulled rather than guided, according to conformists, who may have nodded knowingly when they read Richard Hooker’s prediction about dissidents’ popularity: “He that goeth about to perswade the multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favourable hearers.”68 Hooker might just as well have been commenting on the tribunes in Coriolanus. For their part, however, the reformists were far less interested in Plutarch and republican Rome than in Calvin and the Genevan consistory. To the English dissidents, consistories were a godsend, a brilliantly conceived way to govern parishes. Such parish {  178  } 

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“senates” could resolve “ordinary matters.” Broadly participatory congregational assemblies were excellent occasions for identifying extraordinary matters that would then be reserved for more narrowly restricted deliberations.69 The critics of that bicameral arrangement were critical as well of that “absurde assertion of the puritanes,” to  which we have found them particularly attached—the assertion and assumption that the regenerate commoners could contribute meaningfully to decisions usually left to the clergy. The conformists supposed that congregational conferences under the sway of nonconformist preachers and pastors could do no good. They would sooner recycle worn-out grievances against bishops, the diocesan courts, and defenders of both than discipline their near peers. The consistories just encouraged “private men to impugne orders established in the churche,” creating pockets of resistance in parishes, resistance that would target political or secular and diocesan authority.70 There was no give in the conformists’ case, despite reformists’ protests that commoners’ participation in parish government would be carefully monitored and that the pastors’ guidance or “fore-leading” would channel ordinary Christians’ choices toward productive, not destructive, ends.71 Authorities and authoritarian conformists were unyielding. They argued that misgivings about the value of “playne democracy” were signs of wisdom.72 But not everyone who thought so ruled out giving commoners the opportunity to consent. Richard Hooker, for one, dismissed pleas for local and lay control, maintaining that manipulative “tribunes” or preachers brewed trouble for all from the dissatisfaction of a few. But Hooker’s principal objection to reformist appeals for decentralization was that they were littered with inaccurate, inelegant biblical and historical interpretations. Reformists got their ecclesiology all wrong, he said; they were inept. Of  course, to introduce Hooker’s unfavorable verdict on the proficiencies of the partisans of broad parish participation is not to suggest that he would have been drawn to parish democracy, had his opponents, in his estimation, been more erudite. Still, he acknowledged that the tyranny of the few was as great a danger as mob rule, conceding that “no ecclesiastical law [should] be made . . . without consent as well of the laity as of the clergy.”73 R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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Hooker did not think consent needed to be preceded by anything resembling an unrehearsed airing of contrary views. That could only “breed disturbance.” Reformists who “labour mightily to uphold” regulations that “they frame to themselves” might do very well “in some wildernesse by themselves,” but participatory regimes would undermine “the possibilitie of sociable life” and “overrule” what Hooker called a “lawe of publique determinations,” a law—or, to be precise, a set of laws—to which he thought generations of reformed Christians in England had given consent.74 Reformists who cavalierly set aside “publique determinations” (or their church’s traditions) proved to Thomas Bilson that they were “lede rather with affection than with discretion.”75 Ranked with Hooker among the most learned opponents of “presbyterian democracy,” Bilson was a canon of the cathedral in Winchester when he questioned the wisdom of giving ordinary laypersons a role in parish deliberations, at a time when Catholic missionaries streamed into England from seminaries on the Continent “for the pervertting” of the laity.76 The situation was surely unstable, yet it is not unthinkable that broadly participatory parish regimes might have increased commoners’ stake in reformed religion and their resistance to returning expatriates who tried to convert them. Might ordinary persons have seen presbyterian innovations as progress? Would they have welcomed parish elections as remedies for the greed and carelessness of former patrons? Might reformed parishioners at Cotton in Norwich, whose patron sold their rectory to a “papist,” have thought participatory or congregational government an improvement over the proprietary arrangements that put them in harm’s way—in Rome’s way? We know the parishioners balked at the sale.77 Bilson, however, did not wait for answers. He was disinclined to draw sweeping conclusions from several patrons’ mistakes or from a congregation’s sensible choice. He held his ground even when Bishop Bancroft, who was known for the stridency of his assaults on presbyterian reformists’ politically “dangerous positions,” confided that the “people generally [were] not so madde” as were the theorists who proposed to award them greater shares in church government.78

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On that count, Bilson agreed: puritan, presbyterian theorists, rather than ordinary people, were to blame for mixing piety with politics. The inferences theorists had “pressed out” of the biblical stories about the formation and regulation of the earliest Christian congregations were preposterous. They were only stories, Bilson explained; the Bible was not about how to govern but about what to believe. “No  proofe,” therefore, “can be made that the people have by the Word of God an essentiall interest in the choice of their pastours.”79 To conformists, no such “essentiall interest” could be biblically substantiated. Reformists, who said otherwise and who, by  sleight of mind, coupled the commoners’ spiritual regeneration with the proles’ power in the parishes, were derogating from the authority of bishops and civil magistrates. Bilson bundled together a number of “the infinite places” in the Hebrew scriptures that confirmed governments’ right to determine the trajectories of religious affairs, documenting how Moses, Joshua, and David “meddled with ecclesiasticall men and matters.” The “planting, preserving, and purging [of] true religion,” he asserted, was the province of princes, and not that of local presbyters and ordinary people.80 King James was as happy to hear that as his predecessor had been. His orders that the realm’s parishes be canvassed and that patrons be identified had probably encouraged reformists to think that changes were in the offing, yet optimism in their circles could not have survived the king’s clarification of his “purpose . . . not to constrain either colleges or privat persons to depart with their impropriations . . . nor likewise to diminish our owne reservations, so far as to divest ourselves of all such as we have found our Crown possessed of.”81 That James, in effect, confirmed the Crown’s right to present candidates indicates that the government continued to be convinced by what had become a conformist cliché, the declaration that reformists who insisted incumbents be “elective by the elderships and by the people . . . take away [his] majesty’s power.”82 For their part, the reformists denied it. They repeated for James the assurances they had offered Elizabeth. Parish elections in no way signaled political insubordination, they assured, disputing the logic of the conformists’ position

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that participatory parish regimes spawned political disaffection and disloyalty. Reformists posed absolutely no threat to their sovereigns’ sovereignty over their realm’s churches, they said, although they petitioned Queen Elizabeth and then King James to “plant” and prune (or “purge”) “true religion” differently from the way Bilson, Bancroft, and their kind wanted both done. For example, reformists asked their sovereigns to have cathedrals economize and to use the revenues realized from budgetary restraint to subsidize the training of preachers and “to plant” a preaching ministry in every local church. But the conformist bishops, who needed funds to staff their cathedrals, disagreed and valued diocesan administration, courts and decrees, more highly than a wave of new sermons, which, reformists forecast, would instruct commoners to cut off ambition, envy, and impatience, the three dreaded enemies of both parish consensus and public safety.83 William Perkins referred to them as the “three lets of constancy.” At Cambridge, for nearly twenty years, he taught reformist preachers to warn the laity against each. He explained that the faithful should be satisfied with their “particular callings” and should not strive to rise above their stations and to dismantle the stays of society “upon every light conceit and every sudden occasion,” as did Jack Cade and his crew. A Christian should seek “sufficiency,” not abundance.84 Dudley Fenner and his “forward” friends agreed. They wanted commoners to have a say in parish deliberations, but not to have “sway”—abundant and final authority. The commoners in Christianity’s first congregations had not jockeyed for position, but they were content when authorities sought their consent.

T h e V est ry at St.  Savi our ’s Parishioners in Jacobethan England were more proactive than the earliest Christians had been, although not as conspicuously proactive as reformist activists wanted them to be. Ordinary Christians served as churchwardens. A few commoners in some parishes sat with select vestries as vestrymen determined parish policy, distributed relief funds, and assessed pastors’ performances. Reformed parish regimes {  182  } 

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sometimes adopted management options that seem to have resembled those of late medieval churches, which welcomed lay leadership in subparochial associations, where middlers as well as leading burgesses contributed. So those conformists who thought commoners categorically were unmanageable and unmanagerial were wrong.85 In the 1540s, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, probably encouraged by having watched refugee churches in England manage their affairs relying on lay participation, countenanced holding parish elections of lay officials in English churches as well.86 But parish oligarchies resented and resisted the involvement of “inferior sorts.” During the next decades, prominent reformists echoed the conformists’ calls for more “repressive social control.” Agitation for lay participation became less intense, yet Shakespeare was nearby when vestrymen at St. Saviour’s discovered what historian Peter Lake terms “the considerable potential for social leveling within puritan religion.”87 Coriolanus was first staged at that time, late in the seventeenth century’s first decade. Onstage, patricians chafed at the social leveling in their new Roman republic. They suspected that the rabble planned to “lay all flat” (3.1.198). Their choice as consul, Coriolanus, was contemptuous of the proles, as we now know, and those citizens were fearful that he would somehow scale down their participation in politics. Their tribunes told them they were “at the point to lose [their] liberties” (194). With the republic dismantled and the senate or oligarchy in complete control again, the people would be left with “no more voice than dogs . . . often beat for barking” (2.3.213–14). Did playgoers choose sides? How did they react to the patricians’ opposition to the onset of democracy? Did they sympathize with the proles onstage, protective of their prerogatives? We can do little more than we did at this chapter’s start—namely, formulate the questions. For when the last line was uttered, no Jacobethan reviewers rushed to a desk to meet a deadline and report what patrons took away—or to pronounce on what they were meant to take away—from the play. But what we have done is pore over the results of historians’ determined efforts to find topical references or “reverberations” in Coriolanus and admire their ingenuity and resourcefulness.

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As a result, the worktable is rather cluttered with contextual explanations for commoners’ anxieties, the two tribunes’ treacheries, the patricians’ maneuvers, and the protagonist’s political missteps. And literary historians have not yet nailed down and posted up one interpretation so compelling that it trumps all rivals. Perhaps this chapter’s excavations and presentations of the conformists’ and nonconformists’ remarks about the competence of ordinary Christians and about the possible political repercussions of the rhetoric of regeneration get us closer to the crowd in Coriolanus. Maybe our discussion has gotten us closer to the crowds at the Globe, although we still traffic in uncertainties—in possibilities. If only we knew more about the first performances—about how they were played and received! Alas, we cannot know whether or how often Coriolanus came across as a transparently tactless, monumentally insensitive, iron man. Maybe he was played and perceived as courageous and modest—a good soldier, initially swarmed yet finally, tragically shunned by the ungrateful, prurient, unenlightened beneficiaries of his battlefield endeavors. But those first performances are beyond our reach. To guess that playgoers and playwright shared the conformist Calvinist apologists’ fears about crowds is to presume what curiosity can never convert to fact—namely, the effectiveness of what nonconformists called the “dogge rethorick” of the critics of presbyterian proposals for participatory parish regimes.88 But we discovered in this chapter that the reformists, and, notably, the nonconformists among them, clamored as loudly as their conformist critics did against what Patrick Collinson now describes as commoners’ “practical godlessness.”89 The religiously reformed of all stripes ceased to expect a sudden exchange of the old faith’s folly for their newer faith’s fideism. They pelted complacent coreligionists with evidence of their disgrace to speed up what they regarded as unacceptably slow growth in godliness.90 Self-incrimination was to spur them to repent. Pulpit and pamphlet intimidation was to prompt self-incrimination. Once the faithful found “a heavenly sweetness in their own lives,” they were more fully reformed, “fit to season others” with that “sweetness,” fit, that is, to become the impresarios of others’ regeneration.91 {  184  } 

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Coriolanus, Menenius, and their fellow patricians were far less optimistic. The commoners were “rats” to them. The rats’ spokesman, before the tribunes appear, was base, “the great toe of the body politic” (1.1.154). Menenius condescendingly tells him how the body and body politic depend, respectively, on the belly and on propertied “classes.” Odds are that aristocratic playgoers endorsed the analogy. Menenius’s bearing and belly might have made them forget that the “great toe” answered the old senator with an excellent, alternative interpretation. Menenius depicted the belly as the body’s great benefactor, comparable to his patrician friends, who were fair-minded keepers and distributors of their society’s resources. The toe then poked at the “cormorant belly” (120), after alluding to possessioners’ insatiable appetites and self-importance and after holding them responsible for having undermined the interdependence that should have (and would have had) every part of the body politic (“this, our fabric,” 118) working harmoniously with every other part (78–85). This toe’s tale would have been out of place in Shakespeare’s early plays. It certainly was inconsistent with what the playwright chose to disclose about the cruelties of Cade’s crowd. Playgoers at Coriolanus, however, may well have been struck by the common sense of Rome’s commoners, the play’s “petty helps.” “Hang em,” Coriolanus cries when he first confronts the citizens, promising patricians that, on their say, he would put an end to the republic and gladly “make a quarry with thousands of these quartered slaves” (1.1.189–99). Plutarch seems to have been closer than Shakespeare to commending such sentiment. Old Rome, after all, had not made prole empowerment work remarkably well. But early modern England was still experimenting with ways to accommodate (and weighing arguments to repudiate) the polity implications of a priesthood of all believers in the realm’s established church as Shakespeare was transforming one of Plutarch’s “lives” into his—and Coriolanus’s— tragedy. And that was just six or seven years after the execution of the Earl of Essex, who, historians now say, played for public acclaim.92 Coriolanus did quite the contrary. Yet we can approach the composition and first performances of Coriolanus without drifting back into London’s and the realm’s R e l i g i o u s C o m m u n i t y   { 

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crises. And we can do so while simultaneously probing the religion around Shakespeare. For, months before the play was first staged, “common people and handicraftsmen” from St.  Saviour’s parish in Southwark—a very short distance from the Globe Theater—sued to have their say when vestrymen selected churchwardens. Shakespeare previously buried his brother Edmund within that church—now Southwark Cathedral—which, of course, does not prove he paid attention when “divers parishioners,” “desirous to be informed by the house,” asked Parliament why “thirty vestrymen and not all parishioners be at the choice as in other parishes.”93 Still, the controversy did not end quickly. The lawsuit went on for a few years and involved Shakespeare’s familiars. Theater financier and competitor Philip Henslowe and Edward Alleyn, his fellow vestryman and son-in-law, authorized that funds “out of the parish stock” be allocated to cover expenses incurred defending the vestry.94 Resistance to vestries’ consolidation of power left little evidence elsewhere.95 Not so in Southwark, at St. Saviour’s, where the vestry’s conflict with other parishioners enlivened the religion around Shakespeare. Should Coriolanus be construed as evidence of that conflict? If so, it seems also to be evidence of the ambivalence about the proposed reorganizations of religious communities in Jacobethan England. Vestrymen in Southwark claimed that the congregation had long before “transferred” to the vestry its right to elect churchwardens. But “divers parishioners”-turned-plaintiffs complained about “usurped power” and insisted, against the vestry’s contention, that one could not show “by experience” that direct elections were “unprofitable and inconvenient.”96 The partisans of either side could have exited the theater after a performance of Coriolanus with grist for their respective mills. For the play only illustrates the problems faced by the conformists and reformists trying to distribute power to shape and govern the realm’s religious communities. It tilts to neither side in the Southwark controversy. Instead, it suggests ambivalence toward the sturdy, sometimes stubborn, always suggestible common stock around the Globe—and in the religion around Shakespeare.

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conclusion

Archival excavations and speculation now tempt us to accept that Robert Devereux’s partisans commissioned the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, to perform his “great deposition play,” Richard II, early in 1601.1 Possibly, the idea was to get Londoners to acquiesce in a regime change, for Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was just then assembling friends to stage a demonstration that, at the very least, might discredit his adversaries at Court—maybe even pry the crown from his queen.2 The players refused at first. Shakespeare and his colleagues may not have thought that the profits would justify the expense of reviving their Richard. Essex’s people proposed a subsidy to have the show go on, and apparently it did, but the earl’s subsequent “show” or coup was mismanaged. Elizabeth kept her crown; Essex lost his head. At this point in our study, however, all of that interests us less than the efforts to draw the commission, players, and playwright into the religious history of Elizabeth’s final years.3 For Religion Around Shakespeare was written to correct suppositions similar to historian Jean-Christophe Mayer’s—specifically, Mayer’s impression that the “actors most likely knew the men who

approached them [to revive Richard  II] were in their vast majority Catholic.” Although this is far from proving that the players had “Catholic leanings,” Mayer concedes, it “tend[s] to suggest” that Shakespeare and his company “may have lent a sympathetic ear to [Devereux’s] demands and perhaps to dreams of political change.”4 Mayer’s statements look rather tentative; the phrases “most likely,” “tend to suggest,” “may have lent,” and “perhaps” cry caution. Yet, countering evidence that gets in the way of his inferences, he seems certain of the players’ religious and political motives. He takes their reference to the subsidy on offer as camouflage; he explains away the financial incentive, what he calls “the commercial argument” that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men deployed, in Mayer’s reconstruction, to conceal and excuse their readiness to participate enthusiastically in Essex’s “popish plot.” To recall that Elizabeth exonerated the company—and invited it to perform at Whitehall the night before Essex’s execution—proves nothing, Mayer says: “coincidence.”5 One may be forgiven the assumption that Essex and “the vast majority” of his partisans who importuned Shakespeare’s company were “leaning” toward Catholicism, for Jesuit Robert Persons—“with wonderful dead-pan malice,” Peter Lake says—dedicated About the Next Succession to Devereux, a treatise that argued for a Catholic candidate. And, as Adrian Streete now notes, “Richard II’s deposition runs through [Succession] like a leitmotif,” delegitimizing Tudor sovereigns, including Elizabeth.6 Mayer’s suppositions, however, still need to be brought down to earth. Undeniably, some Catholics conspired with the earl. Francis Bacon conjectured that he promised them to promote religious tolerance. But Bacon also identified discontented “puritans” in Essex’s ranks.7 And, as we learned, the earl patronized leading puritans in London, expecting their celebrated preachers in the city to rally promptly to his cause. That they failed to oblige him was not due to a misperception that he was a crypto-Catholic rebel. Rather, London’s religiously reformed may simply have contemplated the downside—that is, to have calculated costs to their cause of a hastily hatched and unsuccessful plot. Reformers counted Essex as one of them. He was, they knew, impulsive and insolent. It was no secret that he upset the queen. Still, he was regarded, among conformists and {  188  } 

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reformists alike, as Spain’s most ardent enemy in her Privy Council and, as Rome had been told, the likeliest man in England to hold Calvinist factions together against popery.8 Nonetheless, Alexandra Gajda could be right, and Essex may have “deliberately” set out to be “a mediating figure,” giving Catholics and puritans opportunities to express their devotion to Crown and realm, which critics of both factions doubted.9 If so, the irony is that his supporters immediately came under suspicion of disloyalty once their clumsy coup collapsed. Shakespeare’s company was cleared of suspicion, and the more we know about the religion around Essex— and around Shakespeare—the more likely we are to avoid recycling misconceptions about commissions and the conditions of the performances of the latter’s plays. But the same cannot be said about conditions influencing their composition. On that count, we must be tentative, for the plays’ “embeddedness in contemporary polemics” defies precise determination, because the more contentious Jacobethan religious disagreements were terribly complicated, as Leah Marcus confirms; many passages in many plays, she says, “reverberate with subtle evocations of contemporary controversy.” Add subtlety to that complexity and one finds interpretive challenges are in good supply.10 Controversies with her neighbors drew England into conflicts on the Continent. From refugee centers there, expatriate English Catholics pressed patrons, notably Spain’s King Philip II, to invade and recatholicize their realm.11 But Philip and his viceroys were distracted, initially in the Mediterranean and later in the Low Countries. In France, ardent (Guiscard) and moderate (Valois) Catholics were often at war with religiously reformed countrymen—and with each other. Elizabeth’s government intervened on occasion to keep war from its shore, as we shall learn, but the queen and Council were relatively restrained. Resistance to a confessionalized foreign policy could have had some bearing.12 Yet influential voices insisted that England’s interests and those of reformed religion dictated a more aggressive approach and that their realm and ruler assume leadership of a pan-European Protestant league. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, one of those voices, entertained Elizabeth at his castle at Kenilworth, ten or so miles from Stratford, C o n c l u s i o n   { 

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in 1575. Several historians have a hunch that William Shakespeare, eleven years old, and his father were among the spectators. “It goes without saying,” Katherine Duncan-Jones says, “that boys would be let off school . . . eager . . . to glimpse the queen.”13 Pageants, picnics, and colloquy were parts of Leicester’s proposal of marriage, as we mentioned in an earlier chapter, although saber rattling was almost certainly heard as well. The crisis in the Netherlands at just that time prodded Dudley and other hawks to speak with their queen about the “peril facing Protestantism” as well as “the need for international cooperation to withstand it.”14 In their minds, Spain’s interest in a resurgent Roman Catholicism coupled the fate of the Dutch rebellion with that of the English reformation. Dissidents in the Netherlands had agitated for years against King Philip’s plans for their provinces. Protests in the 1560s led to the recall to Spain of Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the leading prelate in the Low Countries, who advocated increasing the number and decreasing the sizes of the Dutch dioceses, a reconfiguration that would have cost imperious abbots healthy portions of their endowments and would have attenuated the influence of the Netherlands nobility over their churches.15 Granvelle’s recall stirred dissidents to demand that Philip’s regent, Margaret of Parma, suspend all decrees against reformed religion. Calvinists and many Catholics feared that Philip would export the Spanish Inquisition to the Low Countries. And the fearful in both confessional camps imagined that Spanish sovereignty would soon extinguish traditional Dutch liberties. Margaret believed King Philip could ease tensions by coming to the Netherlands, where he had been well received in the late 1550s. Instead, he sent Don Fernando Álvarez de  Toledo, Duke of Alba, who, England was promptly told, was crafty and ruthless. His principal adversary, Prince William of Orange, proved no match for him. The rebels’ first military campaign has been described as a public relations and military “fiasco.”16 From Alba’s arrival in 1567 to 1572, Dutch rebels sent emissaries to pelt religiously reformed Londoners with stories of Alba’s treachery. His persecution of insurgents’ leaders and their sympathizers forced a number of them to flee and to sea, where, as self-styled “seabeggars”—Alba called them “pirates”—they seized cargos passing {  190  } 

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between Spain and the Low Countries.17 Elizabeth’s government let the “beggars” resupply in English ports, inasmuch as their thievery complemented its trade wars with Spain. Alba’s agents in London complained, finally coaxing the queen to demilitarize her coast in 1572.18 She ordered local officials to evict Prince William’s motley crews, who—deported—descended on the Dutch coast, captured cities of significance in quick succession, and gave the insurgency what historian Peter Arnade calls its “second wind.”19 Elizabeth has been implicated in the mariners’ strategy to bring the war home, but Olaf Mörke is likely right to suspect that her defiant, then acquiescent, replies to Alba were efforts to wage a “cold war” against Spain and to prevent it from coming to a boil, respectively.20 Leicester wanted a greater English commitment to Prince William’s cause. His queen, however, was cautious, perhaps citing the rebels’ recent difficulties as reasons to limit her government’s involvement. Setbacks followed insurgents’ successes in 1572. Alba was gone, but Catholic and Calvinist dissidents were divided. Catholics protested continued harassment of their priests; Calvinists objected to accommodations in the southern provinces that—more in theory than in practice—gave them freedom to worship publicly. And Spanish soldiers and mercenaries continued to gain ground. Two months before Elizabeth came to Warwickshire and Kenilworth in 1575, guests invited to Prince William’s wedding were warned that they would have difficulties getting safely to the ceremonies.21 William and his partisans appreciated their predicament. They were willing to accept an English protectorate in 1575 in exchange for money, munitions, and men. Elizabeth refused but endeavored to recruit and subsidize surrogates, an approach that hardly appeased Leicester and other religiously reformed courtiers who blamed Prince William’s many difficulties in the late 1570s on their queen’s “cold dealing” with the Dutch.22 Undeterred, she turned to—and flirted with—François Hercule de  Valois, Duke of Anjou, to incline him to intervene in the Netherlands. She seemed prepared to offer matrimony as a last brass to tip the scales. From 1578 into the early 1580s, while prenuptial negotiations ran their course and collapsed, William Shakespeare was a teenager, far, far from Court. Could he have known C o n c l u s i o n   { 

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that Leicester and other vexed Calvinist courtiers grappled with the possibility that a French Catholic could become their queen’s consort and save their reformed friends in the Low Countries? Possibly, long after the Anjou affair, Shakespeare learned that Elizabeth took the lead.23 She could not overcome resistance, either in England or at the Valois Court, where Anjou’s brother and especially his mother, the indomitable Catherine de Medici, opposed his Dutch adventure. Nicholas Bacon, lord keeper of the Great Seal, was sure France would follow Anjou into the Netherlands and that a great war between France and Spain would keep both from troubling England.24 But in France, Catherine ruled. She failed to keep her younger son, François Hercule, from crossing into the Netherlands, yet she appears to have kept her elder, Henry, from accepting the Dutch States-General’s offer of sovereignty months after the assassination of Prince William in 1584.25 (More than a decade later when Shakespeare wrote his Love’s Labor’s Lost, which features seductresses’ skill at matrimonial politics, he might have known something about his own queen’s affairs, but, if historian Hugh Richmond is right, the play reflects, instead, what the playwright discovered in literature describing how ladies at the Valois courts practiced a “blend of romantic sentiment and ruthlessness.” All owed their dexterity to Queen Catherine, Richmond claims; she “never lacked varied resources to divert dangerous men from their potentialities.”)26 With Anjou and Prince William dead—but before Catherine and King Henry III decided to decline the Dutch invitation to intervene— Elizabeth and her Council discussed the possibility of taking unilateral action. For news from the Netherlands was bad; Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma and Philip’s field commander in the Low Countries, recaptured Brussels and Antwerp. In late winter 1585, whatever chances there had been for Anglo-French cooperation against the Spanish troops and mercenaries in the Low Countries were lost. Elizabeth decided that England alone would reinforce the Dutch.27 Leicester was pleased. By the end of the year, he was in the Netherlands, commanding the reinforcements. He angered Elizabeth when, replying to overtures from leading insurgents, he took the post of governor-general. She responded by forbidding him to engage {  192  } 

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Parma in decisive action, summoning him to England, and sending him back, scolded, but Leicester’s last innings in the Low Countries were unremarkable. In Brabant and Flanders, Parma’s continued successes secured a staging area for an invasion of England, which Leicester lived just long enough to see fail. He died in September 1588—weeks after English warships and bad weather scattered King Philip’s armada, sent from Spain through the English Channel to ferry troops from the Netherlands to England. Park Honan thinks that “the Spanish war . . . set a mood for history scripts with strong political implications.”28 During the early 1590s, Shakespeare was in London working on history plays, but he steered clear of recent history—of the 1580s. Instead, he read Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed to repossess the troubles and the treachery of England’s fifteenth-century civil wars, known as the Wars of the Roses. Villainy, brutality, nobles’ abuses of legal procedure, and commoners’ occasional outbursts or stirs made for good theater in the earliest histories Shakespeare composed.29 But, plausibly because the Netherlands misfortunes filled stories often told during his formative years and among refugees, with whom, as we discovered, he kept company, he seems to have wearied of war as the 1590s wore on. The whole realm wearied of war. We have learned that the results of Essex’s expeditions to Spain and Ireland were disappointing. To some, England seemed under siege. “We must live in feare of the Spaniard,” William Younger told his parishioners at the decade’s end, “until wee become penitent for the manifest and manifold transgressions of our lives. . . . [I]f the seas which are as a girdle to this iland . . . were at our command . . . or that our land were walled with brasse and strengthened with the strongest defence against our Nebuchadnezzar of Spain . . . yet would not all this make so much of our safetie as if we had repentance in our hearts.”30 The pious were persuaded that adversities were “sermon[s] of repentance”; crises—real, imagined, or predicted—would bring them to their knees in prayer.31 Predicted adversities and false reports that Spanish troops were garrisoned on the islands offshore stirred panic, as did rumors that a second armada had sailed for England in 1599. Authorities scrambled the civilian militia and saw to training. Historian James Shapiro reports that C o n c l u s i o n   { 

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“great precautions were taken in the jittery capital,” where Shakespeare and his colleagues were “caught up in a frenzy of playwriting.” Still, it seems odd that the crisis left relatively few telltale marks on his plays. “It took some time for Shakespeare to digest what was happening around him and turn it into art,” Shapiro says, although “before 1599 was over he would hit upon how his next tragedy would begin.” He put “jittery soldiers” on guard. “The mood is dark, the threats multiple and uncertain. . . . For many Londoners, the opening scene of Hamlet would have brought a shudder of recognition.”32 A “jittery” city in tense times might account for authorities’ efforts to suppress sedition onstage. In late 1589, the Privy Council instructed the master of the revels, the lord mayor of London, and an official appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury to censor scripts and monitor performances. During the next decade, the playhouses were nearly closed—for reasons other than the plague. The Marprelate controversy, to which we turn next, could have had much to do with the growing influence of antitheatrical prejudices. Might apprehension have led Shakespeare, as “his career developed . . . to make it more and more difficult to . . . moralize the spectacle of his plays,” as literary historian Richard Strier suggests?33 Perhaps; for his thoughts on foreign wars seem to have corresponded with those of the realm’s influential subjects, who were increasingly “disillusioned” with Essex’s belligerence. Historian Steven Marx refers to Shakespeare’s last plays as “propaganda for peace”; he avers that they “reduc[ed] war from a providential tool to an instrument of chaos” at just the time King James was negotiating truces.34 But Shakespeare seems slightly out of step on one count. His history plays, as we saw, showed little sympathy for highly placed prelates who led the government’s campaign against episcopacy’s most outspoken critics. To be sure, the daring and directness of the assaults on episcopacy elicited responses that ranged widely. Conformists were uniformly hostile to the pseudonymous pamphlets that circulated as the work of Martin Marprelate. A few reformists approved of the content but regretted the caustic tone. Moderate puritans criticized both, and bemused Catholics’ “told you so” could conceivably be factored into this mix—although the evidence for that reaction is wanting. {  194  } 

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Marprelate’s barbed depictions of bishops’ greed, self-importance, and indolence may be said to mark the culmination and the collapse of what has been called “the attempt to construct a Presbyterian system from the bottom up.”35 We now know that Shakespeare doctored what he had read about Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester and King Henry VI’s guardian, to turn him into a “pestiferous and dissentious prelatical villain,” “a wolf in sheep’s array,” worthy of Marprelate’s by then notorious malice. More subtly, in the first act of Henry V, the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Ely let us know how their king was, in effect, bribed to cross the Channel and wage war in France to ensure that he was unavailable to endorse efforts in the Commons to confiscate “the better half” of the church’s properties. Marprelate’s makers would have been particularly pleased with the playwright’s rendering and, presumably, with his other indictments of “episcopal militarism.”36 But it could be argued that Shakespeare was not at all pleased with Marprelate. The bloated, blustery figure of Sir John Falstaff in his 2 Henry IV may well have been created to parody puritans, particularly Marprelate. For Falstaff spouted sanctimonious judgments while remorselessly grasping at wealth and influence. Parts of the play, then, compare favorably with anti-martinist lampoons that were commissioned by authorities to signal that Marprelate was a self-aggrandizing buffoon but also a danger to law and order.37 But that take on Falstaff and on Shakespeare’s hostility toward puritan extremism is far from incontrovertible. The character’s original name—Oldcastle—would have reminded playgoers of the proto-Protestant hero martyred during King Henry V’s reign. It was changed to appease Oldcastle’s descendants, yet the “buried connection” was not so well interred that the association was lost. Shakespeare’s “surfeit-swelled . . . feeder of [Prince Hal’s] riots” was identified with Oldcastle into the seventeenth century.38 It is not necessary to choose between Marprelate and Oldcastle to concur with Michael Davies that the figure of Falstaff was introduced as a contrast to King Henry V, who, as Prince Hal, befriended the perfidious glutton. Falstaff was there, Davies says, to be rejected, renounced, “cast off.” And “casting off the old man,” he continues, C o n c l u s i o n   { 

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was typical of Elizabethan puritanism—of Calvinist soteriology.39 It goes without saying—and Davies left it unsaid—that there was much setting aside of the “old man” in the rituals and rhetoric of Roman Catholicism; nonetheless, Davies usefully concentrates on the contrast and on Shakespeare’s ostensible fondness for the religiously and morally reformed Henry V. Falstaff, on this reading, was “a thoroughly worn out and flabby . . . type of Protestant hero,” a prop of sorts, “eclipsed by the Essex like dynamism” of Henry.40 Still, I think it less speculative and simpler to introduce Falstaff as an entertainer. Playgoers were unlikely to encounter Marprelate or Oldcastle at London or Southwark taverns, but only a suffocating skepticism prohibits us from imagining that Falstaffs were commonplace in such settings. Jacobethan confessional interests need not have shaped the indecorous conduct of Shakespeare’s crude, covetous, lewd liver—terms that Marprelate associated with the realm’s bishops. (Could Falstaff or Toby Belch in the playwright’s Twelfth Night have been placed as parodies of bishops?) Falstaff might have been created and played for fun; we know he proved popular and therefore too profitable to be left for dead. After seeming to snuff him out, Shakespeare resurrected him in his Merry Wives of Windsor. To scholars devoted to decoding Shakespeare’s Falstaffs and other characters, a play or episode or protagonist might give mixed signals. Coriolanus, we learned in the last chapter, has been and could be construed as a defense of early modern commoners’ dignity as well as an arraignment of Protestant populists’ deceptions or an expression of Jacobethan authorities’ dread of “the multitude.” Contextually conceivable interpretive possibilities abound. But characters and their statements, I believe, cannot be matted into a coherent confessional position drawing extra-biblical and biblical arguments into a case for (or against) redistributing power in the late Tudor or early Stuart church. When, nearly fifty years ago, Roland Mushat Frye looked in all the plays for links to religious controversies, he found “theological irrelevance” or, if not that, “theological ambiguity.”41 Others have been more optimistic and, arguably, insightful in teasing platitudes from Shakespeare’s plays. Coriolanus is about “the transience of human achievements”—is it not? Other dramas exhibit the nature {  196  } 

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of “true nobility,” and a few relate it to virtues then (and often) associated with Christianity—humility, for instance.42 Platitudes of that kind, however, were in the late Renaissance air. They were atmospheric conditions. I suspect that the legendary literary historian William Hazlitt would have agreed. His John Milton, puritan poet of paradise, inhaled piety and rendered his imagination wholly “subservient” to God. But Hazlitt’s Shakespeare was different; he joined the Renaissance celebrities who, as avowed secularists, took greater pleasure dramatizing “the force of passion.” Still, Shakespeare was exceptionally gifted at impersonating religious figures, Hazlitt conceded; his “genius” was to exchange places with his protagonists and discerningly to play with their purposes, with the ends and means of cunning papal legate Pandulph, devout King Henry VI, rowdy Falstaff, unangelic Angelo, obstinate Coriolanus, avuncular Menenius, enigmatic Isabella, and irresolute Hamlet.43 Confessional quarrels and polemic almost certainly “gave added boosts” to Shakespeare’s “genius” for impersonation.44 So historian Chris Fitter is probably right to suspect that playgoers were “cued by their cultural moment” to “meanings circumstantially evident” in a performance.45 Conceivably, they were also “cued” by telling silences. Did they register Archbishop Arundel’s conspicuous absence in Richard  II from the intrigues that led to the king’s onstage abdication? Did they know about the chroniclers’ insinuations that Arundel had played a large part in the late fourteenth-century plot to unseat Richard? Might Jacobethan playgoers have related the drama’s liberties with history to John Whitgift’s and Richard Bancroft’s efforts to assure their sovereigns of the loyalty of their church? We need not posit direct and irresistible pressure to infer that playwrights would have known the risks of making a spectacle of bishops uprooting royal stumps. Artists, after all, sometimes bow to authorities, for, as W. H. Auden advised, As long as art remains a parasite On any class of persons, it’s alright The only thing it must be is attendant, The only thing it mustn’t, independent.46 C o n c l u s i o n   { 

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Even before the passage of the act “to restrain abuses of players” in 1606—the order that playwrights keep God offstage—they would have suspected that officials were intent on walling off drama from religious doctrine.47 But the dramatists were not prohibited by Parliament from caricaturing all religious personalities. Conformists then in power would have been off-limits, of course, yet sinister papists and overzealous or “guiddy” puritans were obviously fair game. And Shakespeare played them. He sometimes played them for a laugh. Measure for Measure, as well as any of his plays and better than most, shows that he had an eye for the absurd in extreme pieties, Catholic as well as Calvinist. He had what the reformist preacher Henry Smith, without referring to Shakespeare, described as “a wise eye.” But, inadvertently, Smith may have come closest to the playwright’s perspective when he mixed his metaphor and had his “wise eye,” “like the bee, gather honie of everie weede.”48 “Weede,” of course, suggests contempt, and perhaps contempt was behind the plays’ mockery of puritans. And that possibility corresponds with several historians’ obsessions with what looks to them to have been Shakespeare’s secret fondness for “the vital remnants” of England’s old faith. His “aesthetic pose of obliviousness toward current affairs,” on that reading, was deliberately, prudently struck to conceal his Catholicism from prying Protestants. Allegedly, Shakespeare devised a cagey way to send encouraging signals to church papists and priests.49 If so, one road from Shakespeare’s evasiveness— well traveled recently, although, in my opinion, a far from straight and smooth road—leads to his reportedly vigorous yet covert Catholicism. Had Religion Around Shakespeare been drilling for subtexts in his drama—that is, for the religion of Shakespeare—my final few paragraphs would be quite different, and the results would wind up on that road to Catholicism or on another lined with suggestive insights by scholars excavating for the playwright’s reformed sympathies or his hybrid faith. Or Religion Around Shakespeare could have concluded by endorsing an assertion that George Santayana long ago drove into the already jammed lanes of interpretation—specifically, the contention that Shakespeare was “remarkable among the greater poets for being without a philosophy and without a religion.”50 {  198  } 

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I use the plays for another purpose, which—played out—has something admittedly controversial to say about the playwright’s piety— that he was neither staking out a confessional position nor consistently agitating against one. But if our understanding of the religion around him, of those around him who were staking and agitating, has been improved by what my book reveals about late Tudor and early Stuart attitudes toward religious leadership, religious personality, and religious community, its job is done.

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Notes

Capitalization and punctuation of early modern titles and quotes have been modernized throughout the book, but early modern spelling has been maintained. Publication dates for early modern printed texts are given with the first note citation to each in every chapter. Citations to Shakespeare’s plays are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (2011). I have used the following abbreviations in the notes: bl British Library, London

itl Inner Temple Library, London

bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford

lma London Metropolitan Archives

cccc Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

lpl Lambeth Palace Library, London

cmc Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge csp Calendar of State Papers, National Archives, London cul Cambridge University Library dwl Dr. Williams’s Library, London ghl Guildhall Library, London hmc Historical Manuscripts Commission

occc Corpus Christi College, Oxford oqc Queens College, Oxford sp State Papers, National Archives, London waro Warwickshire County Record Office, Warwick woro Worcestershire Record Office, Worcester

I nt ro d u ct i o n 1. Shell, Shakespeare, 5. 2. Consult, inter alia, Wilson, Secret; Kilroy, “Requiem”; Asquith, Shadowplay; Milward, Papist; Cox, “Shakespeare”; Baker, Religion; and Miola, “Shadows.” I refer to playgoers and polemicists— Calvinists and Catholics—as “Jacobethans,” if their participation in either the theater or religious controversy dated from late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I into that of King James VI/I. 3. See Groves, Texts, 5, for “marginality.” The Escher-drenched description of Catholicism around Shakespeare is taken from the dust jacket of Wilson’s Secret, the usually judicious restraint of which contrasts with the sensationalism in which the marketing department indulged. 4. Sinfield, “Providence.” Also see Stachniewski, “Psychology”; Diehl, “Space”; the essays assembled in Battenhouse, Dimension; Tiffany, “Grace”; and Davies, “Calvinism.” Shell, Shakespeare, 15–19, suggests that Shakespeare was “supremely interested in exploiting past and present religions for intellectual and emotional effect” and “probably subscribed”—relatively inconspicuously—to the Christianity of the established church. 5. By the end of the sixteenth century, Catholics in Warwickshire and Lancashire were ready to rebel, according to their expatriate kin on the Continent, and eager to “cutte down and exterpate Calvenists,” who thought that

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Notes to Pages 1–5





Catholic neighbors were waiting to welcome troops from France and Spain and were storing up ammunition “against the day of invasion.” See BL, Harleian MS. 286, 142r–143r (“cutte down”), and CMC, Pepys MS. 2503, 453 (“invasion”). 6. Sutcliffe, Answere (1595), 22v. 7. Carlson, Marprelate. 8. Holstun, “Commotion,” 211. Lately, however, several plays have been read as compensation for what was, arguably, one of the casualties of the confessional, polemical wars—the “craving” that playgoers denied Purgatory and the sacrament of Penance experienced for rituals that helped them “manage” grief; see Greenblatt, Negotiations, 94–128, and Greenblatt, Purgatory. 9. Knapp, “Preachers”; Knapp, Tribe; Hunt, Allusiveness. 10. Lake, “Ministers,” 173; Lake, “Anti-popery,” 87. 11. Davies, “Bard,” signals the frus­ tration of those who do mine for the playwright’s piety, and he ridicules the arguments that what cannot be found—given Shakespeare’s mastery of concealment— can nonetheless be attributed to him. On this count, Bevington, “Biography,” 106–9, is particularly relevant, reminding literary historians that “the mode of creation in late medieval and early modern periods disposed dramatists to subsume” rather than “inscribe themselves in their plays.” And Bevington does not suggest that religious feelings

successfully “subsumed” may be somehow restored. Womersley, Divinity, 11–12, agrees. 12. Marcus, Shakespeare, 50. For “sublimation,” see Nicholl, Lodger, 269. Cha p t er 1 1. Collinson, “Religious Factor.” 2. Bernard, Reformation, makes an exhaustively detailed case that the king did the steering. 3. Horne, Answere (1566), preface and 56r (“ingrafte” and “apperteineth”); CCCC, MS 376, 74 (“wylie foxe” and “rable”). 4. See Walsham, “Trent,” 288–92, for the assimilation of Marian parish clergy. 5. Norton, Subjects (1569), F3r. 6. BL, Sloan MS 326, 44r. 7. Wilson, Secret, 134. 8. BL, Additional MS 48029, 77v. 9. BL, Lansdowne MS 25, 166. 10. Lever, Right Way (1575), A8v. Lever returned from exile at the start of Elizabeth’s reign to become archdeacon of Coventry, not far from Stratford. 11. Beckwith, Forgiveness, 29. 12. ITL, Petyt MS 538/38, 71v. 13. CCCC, MS 114A, 461. 14. Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. F 53, 46v–47v. 15. Prior, Defining, 7–8. 16. Greenham, Workes (1612), 103. 17. Consult Kaufman, Prayer, 54–56, and Kaufman, Laity, 14–20. Calvinist and Catholic pietists are reintroduced and studied in chapter 4 of this book. 18. Hunt, Art, 54, 152–53, 178–79, and 192–93, explains how and

why puritans gradually relinquished their preference for sermons delivered and finally all but abandoned “the reading/ preaching distinction.” 19. BL, Additional MS 38492, 63v. 20. Nichols, Plea (1602), 211. 21. Marsh, Popular Religion; Walsham, Charitable Hatred. 22. BL, Egerton MS 2877, 22v. 23. Throckmorton, Defence (1594), B4v. 24. Bodl. MS Bodley 124, 138 (“principall part”); Bodl. MS Univ. Coll. E 152, art. 4 (“the seale”). 25. Parte of a Register (1593), 260. 26. Udall, State (1588), D4r, reporting conformists’ objections. 27. Whitgift, Defense (1574), 558. 28. Fenner, Answere (1583), 49v. For open “eies,” see BL, Additional MS 38492, 51v. 29. Cosin, Answer (1584), 343–44. 30. LPL, MS 2007, 123r. Also see Parte of a Register, 138. 31. Fenner, Counter-poyson (1584), 68. 32. BL, Additional MS 48014, 193v. 33. BL, Lansdowne MS 30B, 203v–204r. 34. Sutcliffe, Discipline (1590), 46 (“choller”); BL, Harleian MS 4240, 70r–71r (“discourse”). 35. BL, MS Royal 17 B XXII, 321r; Bodl. MS Tanner 302, 6r. 36. Hay any worke for Cooper (1589), B3v–B4v. 37. Lake, Anglicans, 84–85. 38. Just Censure (1589), A4v. 39. Bodl. MS Smith 69, 31. 40. Heal, Reformation, 412. 41. BL, Harleian MS 4240, 65v–66r. 42. BL, Sloane MS 326, 44v. For “blasphemous,” see BL, Harleian MS 7042, 33r.

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43. Grindal, Remains (1843), 304–5, 336, and 348. 44. BL, Lansdowne MS 17, 96r. 45. Collinson, Grindal, 233–37, comments on “evasive tactics.” For the exercises, also consult Denis, “Prophétie,” and Kaufman, “Prophesying.” 46. BL, Additional MS 27632, 47v. 47. BL, Lansdowne MS 17, 129r. 48. DWL, Morrice MSS B.2, 8, and C, 218. Also see Young, Sermon (1576), B8v–C1r. 49. Grindal, Remains, 381–84. 50. BL, Additional MS 29546, 57. 51. LPL, MS 2003, 40r, reprinted in Lehmberg, “Grindal,” 142–43. 52. BL, Cotton MS Titus B VII, 18v. 53. Overton, Exhortation (1582), B6v–C5r. 54. Aylmer, Harborowe (1559), M2v–M3v. 55. Guy, Heart, 157–63. 56. Buchanan, Detectioun (1572), A7v–A8v. 57. For example, see Miola, “Shadows.” 58. Kesselring, “Mercy,” 217–19. 59. Bodl. MS Tanner 80, 9r. 60. Digges, Ambassador (1655), 104–5. 61. Compare BL, Lansdowne 97, 41r–42r, on toleration, with Elizabeth’s position in Digges, Ambassador, 130, and see Doran, Matrimony, 99–129, for this episode and subsequent chapters for assessments of what follows. 62. Digges, Ambassador, 136. 63. Lettres, instructions, et mémoires de Mary Stuart (1844), 3:390. 64. Digges, Ambassador, 153. 65. Barrett-Graves, “Honour.” 66. BL, Cotton MS Vespasian FVI, 147. 67. Nichols, Plea, 173–74.

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Notes to Pages 17–26

68. Doran, Matrimony, 66–72. Also see Hackett, Shakespeare, 115–20. 69. BL, Cotton MS Galba C VI.2, 231v. Also see Mears, “Love-Making.” 70. de Törne, Conquête, 186–87, 219–22. 71. Bodl. MS Perrot 7, 27v (“deferring”); BL, Cotton MS Galba C VI.2, 202v (“gracious assistance”). For English Calvinists’ consternation and compliance, see Collinson, “Strings.” 72. McCoog, “Mission,” 197–99. 73. Stubbs, “Gaping Gulf,” 67–68. For Walsingham’s assessments, see BL, Additional MS 15891, 60r. 74. Stubbs, “Gaping Gulf,” 92–93. Also see Mears, “Counsel,” 640–44. 75. BL, Lansdowne MS 28, 156r. 76. Sidney, Prose, 47–48. 77. CSP, Spanish, 1580–86, 227–30, 239–40. 78. Duquenne, L’entreprise, 165–66. 79. Subsequently, in Parliament, when Peter Wentworth shared his opinions on the merits of the queen’s possible matches, expressing what he believed to be that assembly’s “care and desire to please and profit” the realm, he was twice sent to the Tower; BL, Harleian MS 7042, 187v–188r. 80. BL, Lansdowne MS 39828, 154v. 81. Charke, Answere (1581), C2r–C3v. 82. BL, Harleian MS 4240, 65v. 83. Humphrey, Jesuitismi (1584), 290–91. Stories about the Jesuits’ treachery were regular polemical fare. Officials complained as well that Jesuits transformed their prisons into “seminarie college[s] in the very hart and myddest of England,” teaching fellow inmates to rebel; BL, Harleian MS 7042, 208r.

84. Bodl. MS Top. Oxon. E.5, 3–4. 85. BL, Additional MS 15891, 52v–53v. 86. For the “call,” see BL, Harleian MS 360, 65r. Also consult BL, Harleian MS 6035, 50r and 97r, and BL, Sloan MS 326, 46v. 87. Bodl. MS Smith 69, 75–76. 88. Bodl. MS Perrot 7, 148v. 89. BL, Additional MS 63742, 79v. 90. BL, Harleian MS 7042, 208v and 213r. 91. Elizabeth I, Declaration of Great Troubles (1591), 8–9. Collinson, “Politics,” 84–85, has missionary priests and their patrons “up to [their] neck[s] in the politics of tyrannicide and . . . regime change.” McCoog, “Mission,” 209, contrasts the “vigorous and confident” Catholicism of the missionaries (“this was the Counter-Reformation”) with the resident priests’ discretion. 92. BL, Harleian MS 2194, 39r. 93. Guy, Heart, 474–502. 94. McDermott, Armada, 49. 95. BL, Lansdowne MS 45, 164v–165r. 96. Rogers, Poperie (1589), A4r and 99–101. 97. Fulke, Briefe Confutation (1583), A1r. 98. Roman Catholicism, 26. 99. Walsham, Papists, 94–95. 100. HMC, Foljambe, 58. 101. Aske, Triumphans (1588), 16–17. 102. Ibid., 29–30. 103. BL, Harleian MS 1221, 65v. 104. Bagshaw, Discoverie (1601), 16–19, 49–53. 105. BL, Harleian MS 286, 52v. 106. LPL, MS 650, 196r. 107. BL, Lansdowne MS 61, 25v–35v; BL, Harleian MS 703, 67v–68r.

108. BL, Harleian MS 286, 142r–143r. 109. CMC, Pepys MS N.2503, 453. Also see Questier, Conversion, 179–80; Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 178–79; and Glickman, “England,” 263–64. 110. Gosson, Trumpet (1598), C6r–C7r. Spain was generally held responsible for plots to poison Elizabeth, which even the conspirators— as captives—had conceded were “things horrible to be named, much more to be imagined, and most detestable to be undertaken”; BL, Harleian MS 871, 31r. 111. BL, Stowe MS 166, 181r; BL, Lansdowne MS 84, 92r–95r; Bodl. MS Jones 17, 238r. But also see Wernham, Return, 16–18, and Parker, “England,” 213–14. 112. Devereux, Apologie (1603), A4r. Shakespeare, then twenty, might have followed the exploits of the local hero, Leicester. Yet he is unlikely to have heard much, if anything, of the less creditable, intramural feuding at the field army’s headquarters and of the altogether unimpressive results of the earl’s diplomatic and military initiatives. At Court, of course, reports of feuding and charges of fraud spurred opposition to Leicester’s position as governor-general in the Netherlands, on which see Zim, “Religion,” 902–4. 113. BL, Additional MS 39829, 166r. 114. Expedition of Sir John Norris, 266. 115. BL, Additional MS 48064, 102. For “emphatic” differences between Essex’s intentions and those of Cecil and the queen, see Hammer, Polarisation, 262–63. 116. CUL, MS Mm 1.45, 432.

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117. Compare Howard’s account in Bodl. MS Rawlinson B259, 59r, with Wernham, Return, 104. 118. Devereux, Apologie, B2r. 119. Bodl. MS Tanner 77, 89v. 120. BL, Cotton MS Otho E IX, 307v. 121. Reformists’ attorneys argued that requiring the accused to answer accusations without confronting the original accusers amounted to requiring self-incrimination, which was “expressly inhibited by the lawe of England.” Consult BL, Lansdowne MS 68, 106r; BL, Additional MS 48064, 139v; and Temple, Sermon (1592), B3v. It seems that Essex’s patronage of the religiously reformed was far less effective than Leicester’s: “no suite can prevail” at Court, it was said, when Leicester opposed it; Bodl. MS Jones 32, 41r. 122. LPL, C.Misc. IV, 194, article 4. 123. BL, Additional MS 38492, 73r–74r. For consultants, see Bodl. MS Bodley, 124, 266–69. 124. BL, Lansdowne MS 68, 196v. 125. BL, Harleian MS 7042, 41r. 126. LPL, MS 57, 237 (Cartwright); Gifford, Short Treatise (1590), 80–81. 127. For “blemishes,” see BL, Lansdowne MS 120, 86v. BL, Additional MS 48064 applies the penalty for praemunire to bishops who unjustly silence preachers “without a good and lawfull commission from Hir Majesty.” The conferences or synods in Dedham and Northampton are the best known. 128. LPL, C.Misc. IV, 191, 2v. Also see CUL, MS Mm 1.43, 453–56. 129. Lake, “Identities,” 76–77. Also see Zim, “Religion,” 913.

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Notes to Pages 33–39

130. Seconde Parte of a Register, 1:213. 131. Bancroft, Positions (1593), 101. Also see Hooker, Laws, 7.16.9 and 7.19.1. 132. Hammer, Polarisation, 181–83. 133. BL, Harleian MS 677, 112r–113r. 134. BL, Additional MS 11402, 77v. 135. Correspondence of King James VI (1861), 97–98. Also see BL, Sloan MS 756, 7v. 136. Barlow, Sermon (1601), D1v. Essex insisted that he had been determined to “use all meanes” to keep his accomplices “from blood” (LPL, MS 2872, 57v), but Archer, Stability, 43–44, observes that the rivalry between Essex and Cecil “assumed a bitterness hitherto unmatched in Elizabethan court politics.” Also see Wernham, Return, 306–18, 352–58, and Croft, “Religion,” 774–75. 137. Shapiro, Year, 88–91. 138. Correspondence of King James VI, 23. 139. BL, MS Royal 17B XXII, 319r. Also see Ely, Notes (1602), 263. 140. Questier, Catholicism, 251–52. 141. Bluet, Considerations (1601), A1v. 142. Colleton, Defence (1602), 171. Also see LPL, MS 2007, 231v. 143. Persons, Apologie (1601), 215v–18r. 144. Bodl. MS Jones 17, 239v. 145. Colleton, Defence, 267. 146. BL, Additional MS 39380, 114r–​ 117r. But the appellants were only half-listening to Hilary, who was quite a thorn in the side of the government. Exiled from Gaul, he was soon known as perturbator orientis and was returned to the West, where he earned his reputation as an itinerant pest in the 360s; see Kaufman, Church, 63–66.

147. See OCCC, MS 297, 29r–30r, for the Catholic plaintiffs’ appeal, and Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 320, 27r–28r, on reedification. 148. Correspondence of King James VI, 31–32. What Arnold Hunt calls “the high Calvinist position” would soon be out of favor for having exhibited much the same arrogance in a doctrine of atonement that would be exchanged for a “more inclusive positional theology.” Hunt, Art, 368. Shakespeare’s early history plays cover a period during which the Catholic Church was politically influential, and our third chapter discusses what the playwright made of its influence. 149. Correspondence of King James VI, 34–35. 150. Diary of John Manningham, 245. 151. The speech is reprinted in James VI and I, Selected Writings, 300–301. 152. Bodl. MS Univ. Coll. E 152, 119–20. 153. BL, Egerton MS 2877, 173r. 154. BL, Sloan MS 271, 24v–25r. 155. Barlow, Substance (1604), 82. 156. Jacob, Reasons (1604), 53–54. 157. Barlow, Substance, 77. 158. BL, Harleian MS 677, 44r. 159. Barlow, Substance, 4–5 and 91–92. To shore up that “well setled” religion, James commissioned a new translation of the Bible. When he learned that his team of translators was slow to English the Book of Acts, which had been widely used to support reformists’ proposals for a new, bishop-less polity, he asked Bancroft to have the translators forego “private” business and get busy with their

(and with his) public works; WaRO, CR 136/B, 195. 160. BL, MS Royal B XXII, 403v. 161. Fincham, Prelate, 48–49. 162. Herring, Pietie (1610), B1r–B2r. 163. Bodl. MS Jones 17, 244r. Compare Nicholls, “Strategy,” which argues that Catesby and company were more pragmatic than lunatic. 164. WaRO, CR 136/B, 256. 165. True and Perfect Relation (1606), V2r–V3r. 166. See Cecil’s Answere (1606), B3r, assuring them that they need fear nothing of that sort. 167. BL, Stowe MS 156, 51v. 168. Bodl. MS Jones 17, 242r. For Coke’s denunciation, see Fraser, Faith, 255. 169. Cecil, Answere, C2v–C3r and D1r–D2r. 170. Ibid., E3v–F2r. 171. Fotherby, Foure Sermons (1608), 56–57, 64–65. Chapter 2 1. See Chambers, Facts, 87–95, for documents and commentary, and Nicholl, Lodger, 36–44. 2. See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare, 30–44. 3. Greenblatt, Will, 93–101, and Ackroyd, Shakespeare, 35–39, entertain that possibility. 4. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare, 46–47. 5. Bearman, “Reappraisal,” argues for forgery. 6. Wilson, Secret, 50–51. 7. BL, Harleian MS 1221, 65v. 8. WaRO, CR 1886, 2662, 10r. 9. Bearman, “John Shakespeare,” 423–33. 10. Honan, Shakespeare, 51–59; Weis, Shakespeare, 25–26.

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11. Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, 256–60. 12. Whitgift, Answere (1573), 51–52. 13. Seconde Parte of a Register, 2:116. Also see Minutes and Accounts, 4:15. 14. WaRO, DR 87/1, 112r. 15. See Eccles, Warwickshire, 77–78. Greenblatt, Will, 118–22, has the Hathaways “lean” toward puritanism; Weis, Shakespeare, 52–64, intriguingly complicates William’s decision to marry the woman bearing Susanna, his first child, with stories of other, unrequited love. 16. See WaRO, 794.052, vol. 3, 136v–137r, for the sheep, and BL, Harleian MS 595, 206v, for Bishop Sandys’s confirmation of the parish court’s authority in 1563. Brinkworth, Bawdy Court, discusses its jurisdiction with reference to its subsequent proceedings in Stratford. 17. Burke, “Submissions.” 18. BL, Lansdowne MS 96, 102r–103r. 19. BL, Harleian MS 360, 105r. Garnet, as Robert Miola conjectures, was “probably more shadow than substance for Shakespeare,” but we can easily imagine word of his exploits widely circulating “through gossip, rumor, slander, and screed”; Miola, “Shadows,” 26. 20. Seconde Parte of a Register, 2:168–71. 21. Whitgift, Defense (1574), A2v. 22. Whitgift, Sermon (1583), 79. 23. Minutes and Accounts, 4:17 and 31 (1586 and 1587, respectively). 24. CMC, Pepys MS N.2503, 647. For deference to the Earl of Leicester

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Notes to Pages 51–57

in Warwick, see Black Book of Warwick (1899), 308–13. 25. Leicester’s Commonwealth, 135–36 (“prick him forward”); Adams, Leicester, 30–31. 26. WaRO, CR 2662, 14r. 27. LPL, MS 3470, 22r. 28. Bancroft, Positions (1593), 11r. 29. Gilby, Dialogue (1581), D1r. 30. Pearson, Cartwright, 470–71, prints the prisoners’ appeal to Cecil, then Lord Burghley. 31. Throckmorton, Dialogue (1589), C3v–C4v. 32. Throckmorton, Defence (1594), B3v–B4r. 33. Sutcliffe, Answere (1595), 68v. 34. BL, Lansdowne MS 84, 93r. 35. Desiderata Curiosa (1779), 1:111. 36. For example, Bodl. MS Tanner 80, 9r. 37. Consult Honigmann, Lost Years; Honan, Shakespeare, 60–68; Honigmann, “Question”; and Greenblatt, Will, 103–6. But the evidence of many Shakeshaftes living near Preston suggests that the Hoghton household hired locally; Bearman, “Shakeshafte.” 38. For Fleetwood’s complaining (“gentle dealinge”) and explaining (“sounde gentlemen”), see his letter to Burghley in BL, Additional MS 48064, 68v. For the demand for information about “inconvenient persons,” see the instructions in BL, Cotton MS Titus B II, 239r–240r. 39. BL, Lansdowne MS 97, 141r. 40. Desiderata Curiosa, 1:147. That promise was certainly made and possibly fulfilled before Stanley’s theatrical company employed William Shakespeare. 41. Cox, “Shakespeare,” 545.

42. Wilson, Secret, 206–7. 43. BL, Additional MS 39828, 156v. 44. Kaufman, “Protestant Opposition,” 271–88; Kaufman, “Godly,” 238–53. 45. The term “unlawfull mynisters” was used in 1588 by Warwick reformists to refer to their religiously reformed clerical colleagues who were unprepared to preach (BL, Harleian MS 7042, 73), but the epithet “unlawful” surfaces in conformist as well as Catholic polemic to apply to different sets of priests and pastors. 46. See LPL, MS 3470, 129r, for Cartwright and Aldgate; BL, Harleian MS 292, 46r, for Holborn; and Croft, “Capital Life,” 65–68, for the relationships between government in Westminster and commerce in London. 47. LPL, MS 242, 8r. 48. BL, Harleian MS 280, 166r. 49. LMA, DL/C/335/X019/003, 1583–1590, 343r. 50. Chambers, Facts, 87. 51. Stow, Survey of London (1598), 133. 52. Ackroyd, Shakespeare, 171, unconvincingly endorses Aubrey’s take. 53. BL, Additional MS 34729, 73r. 54. Annals of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate (1876), 52–54, 106, 220–21. 55. GHL, MS 6836, 51–52 and 286–87. 56. Weis, Shakespeare, 255–56. 57. Stockwood, Sermon (1578), 132–33. 58. Northbrooke, Spiritus (1579), 28v–29r. 59. Hill, Crie (1595), 17. Perhaps a more comprehensive bias docks alongside reformists’ complaints of immorality. Shell, Shakespeare, 70, holds that the antitheatrical prejudice “emphasized the polarity between God’s Word and

the human imagination, to the inevitable discredit of the latter.” “It is in this light,” Shell argues, “that we must see Shakespeare’s more positive claims for the imagination.” 60. Floyd, Overthrow (1612), 112–14, perhaps commenting on Crashaw, Sermon (1608), 170–72. On pulpit theatricality, see Hunt, Art, 158–59. 61. Smith, Sermons (1593), 721–22; for Smith’s screed on the ingratitude of cultured despisers of the countryside, see 579–81. 62. See BL, Sloane MS 271, 24v–25r, for Stephen Egerton’s criticisms, and BL, Egerton MS 2877, 163v, for “impeach[ed].” Also consult BL, Lansdowne MS 61, 92v and 94r. 63. BL, Harleian MS 360, 29r. For idolatry, see Perkins, Warning (1601), 93–95. 64. Perkins, Warning, 45–47 and 93–95. Patterson, “Perkins,” 252–53, reclassifies Perkins as an apologist for the established church, but on Perkins among the puritan pietists, consult Kaufman, Prayer, 58–65, and Knappen, Puritanism, 367–78. 65. In his “dedicatorie epistle” to Perkins’s Repentance (1605), Crashaw mentioned that his antagonism toward “poperie” and his views on the insufficiency of Roman Catholicism owed everything to Perkins’s Cambridge lectures. 66. Perkins, Warning, 118–19. 67. Perkins, Galatians (1617), 217–20. 68. Perkins, Catholike (1597), 335–36. For “inward peace,” see Perkins, Declaration (1590), 59.

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69. See, for example, BL, Lansdowne MS 42, 168r–171r. 70. Perkins (1597), Catholike, 169–82. 71. Perkins, Declaration, 193–94. 72. For “occasions of idolatrie,” see Perkins, Warning, 109; for idolatry and Catholicism’s “worship of society,” see 116–18 and 131–75. Also see Perkins, Covetuousnesse (1603), 261 (“we ought not addict our selves”). 73. Perkins, Galatians, 34. 74. Crashaw, Mittimus (1625), 68–70. 75. Floyd, Overthrow, 286. 76. Crashaw, Mittimus, 19 (on fleecing) and 43 (“libertie and looseness”). 77. Crashaw, Sermon, 103–4 (“rotten ripenesse”); Crashaw, Gospel (1610), 37–38, 87–89, 99 (on milk and blood). 78. Walsham, “Preachers,” 80–84 and 121–22 (“surrogate”); Crashaw, Discovery of Papal Corruption, BL, Royal MS 17B, IX, 3r (“braggeth” and “house”). 79. Crashaw, Sermon, 64–68. 80. Ibid., 82–87. 81. Ibid., 6. 82. Andrewes, Sermons, 184–85. Also see Ferrell, Government, 113–15. 83. Lake, “Anti-popery,” 72–74, 80–82, 94–97. 84. Compare Bilson, Difference (1585), 581, with Bilson, Governement (1593). 85. LPL, MS 3470, 166r. 86. James, Sermon (1590), B1r, C3v–C4r. 87. BL, Additional MS 22473, 19v–20r. 88. Babington, Sermon (1591), 47–49. 89. Temple, Sermon (1592), B4r–B6r; also see C2v (“nothing aright”) and D2r (“froward offence”).

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Notes to Pages 65–79

90. White, Sermon (1589), 24. 91. Bancroft, Positions, 170–71. 92. Sutcliffe, Answere, 15v–16r. 93. Walsham, “Hacket,” 44–45 (“shaman”); LPL, MS 2008, 42r (“submission”). 94. Nichols, Plea (1602), 202. 95. Cosin, Conspiracie (1592), 74–82. 96. See Andrewes, Combate (1592), 4v–5r, on “evill speakers”; for “wanting the abilitie,” see 42v–43r. 97. BL, Harleian MS 292, 168. 98. BL, Additional MS 44848, 43v. 99. Digges, Motives (1601), 28, purporting to quote Jesuit Robert Persons. For Devereux’s send-off and return from Ireland, see Shapiro, Year, 91–93 and 268–70. 100. Babington, Workes (1619), 147–48. 101. Hammer, “Shakespeare’s Richard II,” 12–18. 102. BL, Sloane MS 756, 7v. 103. Barlow, Sermon (1601), C7v. 104. BL, Egerton MS 2714, 109r. 105. Barlow, Sermon, C1v–C2v. 106. Wotton, Sermons (1609), 417. 107. Digges, Motives, 25–28. 108. Ibid., 32–33. 109. James, Sermon, G1v–G3v. 110. Hunt, “Pulpits,” 93–94, 107–9. 111. Maxey, Chaine (1606), I4v. 112. Shapiro, Year, 114–17; Greenblatt, Will, 292–93; Dillon, Theatre, 151–52. 113. Daniell, “City,” 326–27. 114. Philips, Sermons (1605), A7r. 115. Ibid., 75–77 (“execrable”), 285–86 (“confidence”). 116. Ibid., 437. 117. LMA, P92/SAV/450, 327. 118. Ibid., 397. 119. Shell, Shakespeare, 76–77. 120. Philips, Sermons, 131–32. For con artists, see van Elk, “Misidentification,” 323–30.

121. Philips, Sermons, 276–77, 410–11. 122. Ibid., 168, 280–82. 123. See LMA, P92/Sav/450, 357, for St. Saviour’s. For self-help at St. Olave’s, Jewry, see GHL, MS 4415/1, 43v. 124. Philips, Sermons, 385. 125. LMA, P92/Sav/450, 342. 126. Philips, Sermons, 218–21. 127. The “parson” there served also as a chaplain at St. Saviour’s; BL, Harleian MS 595, 256v. 128. Nicholl, Lodger, 58–59, quoting Stow. 129. BL, Harleian MS 813, 15v. Paget had preached most often in Northamptonshire and Cornwall. 130. BL, Egerton MS 2877, 22r, from Gilbert Freville’s transcription. 131. Ibid., 41r. 132. BL, Lansdowne MS 84, 172r (“paynes”); BL, Royal MS 17B, xxii, 346v (on fear of St. Paul’s “falling down”). 133. Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 336 (“cesspit”) and 355 (“soul-​ wrenching”). Our fourth chapter, on religious personality, looks at several of Shakespeare’s plays alongside the efforts of reformists, conformists, and Catholics to structure readers’ and listeners’ desires. There, we expect to learn more about their efforts. 134. Holstun, “Commotion,” 197–98. 135. GHL, MS 1431/3, 84v. 136. Unfortunately, churchwardens’ accounts for, and the minutes of vestry meetings at, the church closest to Shakespeare’s lodgings, St. Olave’s, Silver Street, have gone missing. We have nothing for the years he lived there, although documents for St. Alban, at the intersection of Wood and

Silver Streets, usefully give a sense of the parish officials’ extraparochial duties (e.g., GHL, MS 1264/1, 23v). The two parishes were near enough for funerals at the first, St. Olave’s, to be marked by the “knyll and peales” at the second (GHL, MS 7673/1, 53r), yet we have no evidence that Shakespeare ever attended either. 137. GHL, MS 1431/1, 70r. 138. GHL, MS 4415/1, 37v and 44r. 139. Nicholl, Lodger, 217–32; Bate, Soul, 187–88. 140. Epistulae et Tractatus, 3.1 (1897), 1171–75. 141. Ibid., 923: “J’ay tousjours porté bonne affection aux estrangers refugiez pour la religion.” Pettegree, Communities, discusses the early opposition to the “strangers” and Kaufman, Laity, 123–24, comments on later problems, but also see Grell, Exiles, 147–48. 142. Bodl. Wood MSS F30–32, 87. 143. E.g., Epistulae et Tractatus, 3.1, 1117, 1145–46. 144. Nicholl, Lodger, 177–79, imagines that Shakespeare was quite at home there. 145. Greenblatt, Will, 379–81. 146. Wilson, Secret, 259–60. 147. Honan, Shakespeare, 379–80. We cannot tell where Shakespeare lodged in London after leaving Silver Street and before taking up residence at Blackfriars. Honan evicts him from the Mountjoys’ property in 1606 but has no place to deposit him. Nicholl, Lodger, 17–18, 247–48, tentatively settles him in Southwark by 1609, after the death of Mountjoy’s wife. Bate, Soul, 358, is at sea, admitting “we cannot formally prove

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that Shakespeare was in London between autumn 1604 and early summer 1607.” 148. Hughes, “Religion,” 58–63. 149. WaRO, CR 136/B/91 (1603). 150. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare, 283. 151. Chambers, Facts, 169–80. I nt erlu d e 1. Hence, I think that Groves, Texts, 154–83, is on safer ground when she says that Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure “explores fissures that result when the gospels’ radical meaning of mercy is negotiated in the fallen world of human law and order” than when she refers to the play as an “endorsement of King James’s project of Christian kingship.” For “decoding,” see Marcus, Shakespeare, 36–37. C ha p t er 3 1. Stuart Constitution, 458–59. 2. Compare Questier, “Loyalty,” 311, 319–20, with Milton, Catholic, 257–58. 3. See Buckeridge, De Potestate Papae (1614), 384–85, on papal excommunications, and Sutcliffe, De Pontifice Romano (1599), 292–93, on jurisdiction in Deuteronomy. For Catholics’ “conspiracie,” see Sutcliffe, Abridgement (1606), 239–40. 4. Bilson, Difference (1585), 491. 5. Tyndale, Obedience (1535), 157r. 6. Bale, Johan; Munday, Watch-Word (1584), 40–41. 7. Honan, Shakespeare, 194.

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Notes to Pages 86–97

8. Compare Groves, Texts, 101–4, 119–20, with Bate, Soul, 47. 9. Everitt, Plays, 162–63 (Troublesome Reign, 2.1.1009–70). 10. See Sams, Shakespeare, 146–53. 11. Willet, Synopsis (1592), 183–89. For papal efforts to overthrow governments, see Willet, Catholicon (1602), 47–50. 12. Sutcliffe, Abridgement, 212–13. 13. Perkins, Catholike (1634), 293–94. Among related indictments of papal pretensions, consult Morton, Imposture (1628), 30–35; Bilson, Difference, 503–5; Willet, Catholicon, 209–11; Willet, Antilogie (1603), 54; and BL, Lansdowne MS 97, 142v. 14. Willet, Synopsis, 149. 15. Powell, Consideration (1604), 121–22. 16. Spiekerman, Political Realism, 44–52. 17. They originated as temporary detention centers; review the evidence collected in Kaufman, “Sanctuary.” 18. Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 229–30. 19. 1 Henry VI, 3.1. 20. Wentersdorf, “Winchester,” 446–49. 21. 1 Henry VI, 5.1.33. 22. Ibid., 1.3.36 (“schoolboy” and “overawe[d]”); 2 Henry VI, 2.1.56 (“holiness”). 23. Compare Shakespeare’s Holinshed, 165, with 1 Henry VI, 1.3, and with Beaufort’s “obituary” in 2 Henry VI: “So bad a death argues a monstrous life” (4.1.30). 24. Grene, History Plays, 101–2. 25. 1 Henry VI, 1.3.49–50 (“under my feet”). For the hostility of heavenly spirits (Tantaene animis coelestibus irae?), see 2 Henry VI, 2.1.24.

26. Zurich Letters (1842), 1:63–64. 27. CUL, MS Mm 1.43, 433. 28. Zurich Letters, 1:50–51. 29. BL, Egerton MS 3048, 207v–208r. 30. Howson, Sermon (1597), 22–24, 28–29, 41. 31. Sandys, Sermons (1841), 43–44. 32. Chardon, Sermon (1595), E1r. 33. Howson, Sermon, 16–17. 34. Andrewes, Opuscula, 34–35. 35. BL, Additional MS 27632, 50r–51v. 36. BL, Lansdowne MS 45, 92r–93r. 37. Paule, Life (1699), 86–87. 38. Fincham, Prelate, 89–91; Collinson, Religion, 48–49. 39. WaRO, CR 136/B, 210. The phrases express bishops’ general expectations of commissions but refer here to the archbishop’s instructions to commissioners in 1608 to void the elections of the subwarden and of several bursars at St. Mary’s College, Winchester. 40. HMC, Salisbury, 6:265–66 (Thomas Bilson to Robert Cecil, July 1596). 41. Quoted in Fincham, Prelate, 120–21, and dated to 1604. 42. Yet Hamilton, Shakespeare, 93–96, maintains—​although rather unconvincingly—​that Toby Belch in Twelfth Night gives away the playwright’s displeasure with tipsy conformist bishops who torment their reformist critics. 43. Compare Shakespeare’s Richard III, 4.3 and 4.4, with Morton’s sensible interventions in Thomas More’s Utopia and Richard. For another instance of “sanitizing” in Shakespeare’s history plays, the inclusion—​and then subsequent deletion—​of one archbishop’s confusion of politics with piety, see Shapiro, Year, 136–37.

44. Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare, 193. 45. Knapp, Tribe, 139. 46. Heal, Prelates, 305–6 (“censoriousness” and “accusations”); see Heal, Hospitality, 276–86, for the importance of sustaining “affability.” 47. Collinson, Religion, 62–66. 48. LMA, DL/​C/​335​.6​, 300r (Liber Vicarii Generalis, 1590–99). 49. Fincham, Prelate, 196–201. 50. Bearman, “John Shakespeare,” 416. 51. BL, Harleian MS 280, 160r–161r, 168v. 52. Black Book of Warwick (1899), 397. 53. Elizabethan Episcopal Administration, 2:57. 54. Hutton, Correspondence (1843), 72. 55. Bodl. MS Selden Supra 44, 52r. 56. Whitgift, Answere (1573), 89. 57. Whitgift, Defense (1574), 346–48. 58. Examination of Dr. Whitgift’s Censures (1575), 24. 59. See BL, Additional MS 15891, 51v, for Sandys’s scandal, and Bodl. MS Tanner 79, 152v, for the “griefes” of “madd ministers.” 60. BL, Lansdowne MS 28, 159r (Cecil); CUL, MS Mm 1.43, 446 (Field). 61. BL, Additional MS 48039, 2r and 86r. 62. BL, Lansdowne MS 42, 185v. 63. Strype, Whitgift (1822), 3:70–81, reprints the sermon. 64. BL, Additional MS 38492, 73r. 65. Strype, Whitgift, 3:79–81. 66. Fenner, Defence (1587), B1v–B2r. For Dering, see BL, Additional MS 28571, 106v. 67. Questier, Conversion, 205–6; Dawley, Whitgift, 164–68; Prior, Defining, 67–72.

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68. BL, Harleian MS 813, 19r. 69. See BL, Additional MS 48039, 86r, for Robert Beale’s contention to that effect. 70. For example, BL, Royal MS 17B, XXII, 377v. 71. LPL, MS 647, 162v. 72. See BL, Additional MS 15891, 127r, for Cecil and Whitgift, and BL, Additional MS 22473, 8v–11r, 19v–20r, for “weightie considerations.” 73. Heron, History, 128–42, is an excellent specimen. 74. Whitgift, Defense, A2. 75. BL, Lansdowne MS 42, 103r. 76. See BL, Additional MS 34729, 50v–51r, for conformists’ efforts, and BL, Lansdowne MS 42, 114r, for “meanelie qualifyed.” 77. Collinson, “Religious Factor,” 246–47, 254–57. 78. CUL, MS Mm 1.43, 452–55. 79. Wigginton’s mock visitation articles were reprinted in the Transactions of the Congregational History Society 3 (1908): 27–32. For his remarks on pestilential “prelacye,” see Seconde Parte of a Register, 2:247. 80. BL, Lansdowne MS 84, 238r. 81. Cosin, Conspiracie (1592), 11. 82. BL, Lansdowne MS 61, 5r. 83. CUL, MS Mm 1.45, 337–38; also see Penry, Treatise (1590), A2v. Bishops’ increasing affluence is hard to deny in light of the statistics compiled by Felicity Heal. During the first twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign, only 5 percent of her bishops died rich. From 1580 to King James’s succession in 1603, and some years beyond, only 5 percent died poor. Heal, Prelates, 316–21. 84. DWL, Morrice MS C, 455–57.

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Notes to Pages 109–118

85. Perkins, Calling (1605), A8v–B3v and C8v–D1r. 86. LPL, MS 647, 194r. 87. WoRo, 794.053, 3, 74v. 88. Cosin, Apologie (1591), 57–58. For Morrice, see LPL, MS 3470, 166r. 89. Whitgift, Answere, 278–79. Whitgift became something of an isolationist. He resisted overtures to meddle in wars abroad when John Piers, bishop of Salisbury, urged him to move the Council to deploy English troops and spend its treasury so that “other princes’ subjects” would not be “forced to commit idolatrie”; BL, Additional MS 34729, 58v–60r. 90. BL, Landowne MS 45, 99r. 91. Epistulae et Tractatus, 3.1 (1897), 1135–36. 92. Ibid., 1172. 93. Rose, “Kingship,” 58. 94. Hill, Crie (1595), 52–53. 95. For “hardening,” see Lake, Anglicans, 93–97. 96. Downame, Sermon (1608), 25–28, 73–74. 97. LMA, DL/C/335, 6, 78r. 98. Downame, Sermon, 51–52, 58. 99. Downame, Defence (1611), Aaaa, 3r. 100. BL, Lansdowne MS 97, 106. 101. Downame, Sermon, 79–80. He probably meant to commend the role of “moral patriarch,” which historian Peter Lake counts as critical to the conformists’ image of episcopal leadership; Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 126–31. 102. Udall, Demonstration (1588), C2r and 29. For allegedly undutiful critics, see BL, Harleian MS 360, 78r. 103. Barlow, Sermons (1606), 3v. 104. See Prior, Defining, 113–14. 105. Compare Penry, Discovery (1590), A4r, with Bilson, Governement

(1593), 327, 359–60, and Bancroft, Positions (1593), 127–28. 106. Sharpe, “Strain,” 197–99; Fox, “Complaint,” 241. See BL, Harleian MS 7042, 341–42 and 361, for pressure from Peter Wentworth, MP. 107. The archbishop’s consolation and rejoinder are printed in Strype, Whitgift, 3:78. 108. Collinson, Movement, 246–47. 109. BL, Lansdowne MS 61, 151v. 110. Stuart Royal Proclamations, 60–62. 111. BL, Harleian MS 280, 157v. 112. BL, Additional MS 38492, 7r. For the upkeep of the surplices at St. Giles, Cripplegate, while Shakespeare seems to have been nearby, see BL, Additional MS 12222, 64v, 65v, 79v. 113. BL, Additional MS 27632, 48r. 114. BL, Additional MS 38492, 62r. 115. James, Sermon (1590), E2v–E3r. 116. BL, Additional MS 48039, 66v–67r. 117. Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 655–56. Bate, Soul, 23, supposes that Shakespeare “took pleasure in teasing” the puritans with hypocrites like Angelo, given the London reformists’ drumming on the alleged immorality of the theater. 118. Gifford, Dialogue (1599), G6v (“shaddowith thinges”); Dent, Pathe-Way (1601), 86–88 (“garish showes”). 119. Diehl, Reform, 90. Cha p t er 4 1. Egerton, Lecture (1589), A4v and B2r. For the “inward turn,” see, inter alia, Ferry, “Inward” Language; Cohen, God’s Caress; Maus,

Inwardness; Kaufman, Prayer; and Bozeman, Precisianist Strain. 2. Virell, Treatise (1594), 105. 3. Egerton, Lecture, B3r (“want of occasion”); Virell, Treatise, 169–70 (the “faithfull . . . farther from God than pharaoh”). 4. Beza, New Testament (1577), 308v. 5. Egerton, Lecture, B5r–B6v. 6. Greenham, Comfort (1595), 110. 7. Gifford, Fortitude (1594), D2v–D4v. 8. Shapiro, Year, 292–302. Also see Bate, Soul, 387–89, 410–11, 423–25. 9. Ackroyd, Shakespeare, 262–67, lately circulated that notion among general readers. Curran, Hamlet, 26–29, offers a strange twist, claiming that destabilization was tantamount to liberation from oppressive Calvinist determinism. 10. Questier, Conversion, 272–74. 11. Rogers, Treatises (1605), 416. 12. Compare Ferry, “Inward” Language, 21–41, with Kaufman, Prayer, 139–43. 13. See Bownde, Medicines (1604), 77–78, on judging oneself, and 279–80 for Bownde’s David. 14. Perkins, Casuistry, 125–26. 15. Cade, Agonie (1618), 16–19. 16. Beza, Treasure (1581), C2v. 17. Bownde, Medicines, 256–58. 18. Greenham, Workes (1605), 265. 19. See Bownde, Medicines, 294–95, for power in weakness; also consult 130–32 and Bownde, Unbeleefe (1608), 68–72. 20. Stachniewski, Imagination, 331. 21. Ibid., 92–94. 22. Dent, Path-Way (1607), 242–43. 23. Wilcox, Doubting (1598), 112–18. 24. Gosson, Trumpet (1598), F5v–F8r. 25. Phillips, Repentance (1584), D3v–D4v. N o t e s t o P a g e s 1 1 8 – 1 3 2   { 

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26. BL, Egerton MS 2877, 30v–31r. 27. Topsell, Reward (1596), 26–28. Also see Kaufman, Prayer, 91–92, and Green, Print, 318–19. 28. Maxey, Chaine (1606), H1v. 29. Dering, Letters (1590), C8v. 30. Wilcox, Doubting, 227–28. 31. Gilbert, “Modo” (1583), 331. 32. Persons, Directory, 26–27. 33. Ibid., 277–79. 34. Bunny, Exercise (1584), 214 (“austeritie” on 205). 35. Gilbert, “Modo,” 335. 36. Persons, Directory, 317. 37. Ibid., 321–24. Also consult O’Malley, Jesuits, 139–41. 38. Bunny, Answer (1589), 127–28 (“commoditie” and “mutabilitie”) and 159 (“munkerie” and other deletions). 39. Ibid., 102–4. 40. Bunny, Exercise, 308. Also consult Gregory, “Service.” 41. Bunny, Exercise, 29–31. 42. BL, Lansdowne MS 96, 120v. 43. Persons, Directory, 149. 44. Bunny, Exercise, 174–75. 45. Bunny, Answer, 121. 46. de Granada, Memoriall (1599), 222–25 (“wrangling” puritans); de Granada, Prayer (1596), 108 (“merciful and medicinable”). Also consult Memoriall, 546–47, for Christians’ perplexity about their perpetually “foule,” “spotted,” and “defiled” conditions. 47. de Granada, Prayer, 60–62. 48. Pilarz, Southwell, 147–49 (“interior knowledge”); Sweeney, Southwell, 51–53, 71–80. 49. Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, 244. 50. Southwell, Poems, 35–36 and 49–50. 51. Ibid., 58–59.

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Notes to Pages 132–148

52. Ibid., 43–45. 53. Janelle, Southwell, 277. 54. Sweeney, Southwell, 157. 55. Brietz Monta, Martyrdom, 149–50. 56. Dent, Sermon (1585), B8v, italics added. 57. Ibid., C1v–C2r. 58. Southwell, Poems, 96. 59. Questier, “Locusts,” 271–72. 60. Janelle, Southwell, 205–18. 61. Southwell, Poems, 90. 62. Martz, Poetry, 204–7. 63. Brown, “Structure,” 3–11. 64. Southwell, Poems, 98–99. 65. Ibid., 93. 66. Janelle, Southwell, 16. 67. Bruhn, “St. Peter,” 33–49. 68. Questier, “Locusts,” 278–79. Also see Questier, Conversion, 87–94, 178–81. 69. Milward, Background, 58–59. Also see Kaufman, Prayer, 141–43, and Kaufman, “Confessing Animal,” 49–65. 70. Bate, Soul, 23. 71. Shuger, Theologies, 118–19, 124, 130–33. 72. Measure for Measure, 2.2.45: “You are too cold.” For “coldly legalistic,” see Hunt, “Precise,” 255. 73. Espencaeus, Collectaneorum (1565), 195. 74. BL, Harleian MS 7042, 85–86. 75. BL, Additional MS 38492, 74v. 76. Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 626–28, 635–36. 77. WaRO, CR 136B/22 (1607). For polarization, see Wrightson and Levine, Poverty, 175–79, yet, for reservations, see Kaufman, “Conservative,” 29–34. 78. Sutcliffe, Answere (1595), 22v. 79. When A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare, 271–72, writes of Angelo’s “steely consistency,” he refers to his

“legalism” and overlooks the deputy’s self-doubts, which, it seems, Sarah Beckwith (“Penance,” 204) does as well, concluding that “what the play explores . . . is the sort of theater that occurs where interiority is hollowed out.” 80. Crashaw, Sermon (1608), 29. 81. Gifford, Declaration (1590), 15–16, 89–91. 82. See Kaufman, “Researches,” 163–82. 83. Gifford, Short Treatise (1590), 66. 84. Gifford, Reply (1591), 9–10. 85. Diehl, “Space,” 396–97. 86. Dent, Sermon, D3r–D4r. 87. Hunt, “Precise,” 243–67. 88. See BL, Additional MS 34729, 58v–60r, for Constantine’s “intermeddl[ing]” in Persia. Also consult Bilson, Difference (1585), 192–93; BL, Harleian MS 6992, 61r; and Adams, “Sovereignty,” 315–16. 89. BL, Additional MS, 38492, 64r. 90. Marcus, Shakespeare, 177, suggests that Sir Edward Coke and Sir John Popham fit the bill. 91. Shuger, Theologies, 102–3, 117; Gless, Law, 252. 92. Hildersham, Treatise (1595), 74–75. 93. BL, Stowe MS 424, 159v. 94. Hill, Crie (1595), 44–45. 95. Greenblatt, Curse, 121–23; Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 684, 699–700. Subsequently, Greenblatt, in Freedom, studied Shakespeare’s “autonomy,” measuring his “distance from conventional expectations” (5), but stipulated that his occasionally unconventional playwright did not stray so far as to “distort reality . . . in the direction of irrational longing” (118).

96. Cosin, Conspiracie (1592), 5, 26–27, and 68–69. 97. Throckmorton, Defence (1594), A2r–A3r. 98. Sutcliffe, Answere, 58v; Cosin, Conspiracie, 25. 99. LPL, MS 2008, 29r. 100. Sheils, Puritans, 137–38; Walsham, “Hacket,” 42–47. 101. See BL, Harleian MS 7042, 19, for Field. 102. Cosin, Conspiracie, 95–96. 103. BL, Additional MS 27632, 47v. 104. Clarke, Martyrologie (1651), 389–90. 105. Bate, Soul, 73. Chapter 5 1. Greenblatt, Will, 169–70. For the caricatures of the crowds, see Anthony and Cleopatra, 5.2.209–11 (“aprons” and “diets”); Julius Caesar, 1.2.257 (“tag-rag”); and I Henry IV, 5.1.76–78 (“fickle” and “hurleyburly”). 2. Greenblatt, Will, 169 (“suffused” and “coordinates”); Duncan-​ Jones, Shakespeare, 60 and 116 (“multitude”). 3. Stirling, Populace, 99, 120, 151, and 175. 4. See Patterson, Voice, for Shakespeare’s “populism.” 5. Kermode, Language, 244 and 254. 6. Arnold, Citizen, 196–202, makes a compelling case that “in Shakespeare’s radical rewriting of Plutarch” and others, “the election of the tribunes . . . disempowers the people and usurps their voices.” The playwright underscores the tribunes’ manipulation, rather than their

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representation, of the crowd; I will suggest that Shakespeare has them manipulating Coriolanus and the senate as well. 7. See, inter alia, Jagendorf, “Coriolanus,” and Munro, “City,” 254–56. 8. Gilby, Dialogue (1581), C3v. 9. Greenham, Workes (1612), 104. For the prospects for worthy, grave men in religious service, see the instructions “for the better ordering and direction of ecclesiastical government” in DWL, Morrice MSS B.1, 276, and C, 338–39. 10. Shrank, “Civility,” 414–15. 11. Reynolds, “City,” 112; Sorge, “Failure,” 235–37; Hatlen, “Identity,” 413–19. 12. Patterson, Voice, 16–18. 13. Bedford, “Respect,” 339–41. 14. Barton, “Livy”; Hadfield, Politics, 178–210; Patterson, Voice, 120–46. 15. Arnold, Citizen, 97–98. 16. Leinwand, “Shakespeare,” 300–302. Also see Bristol, “Crisis,” 214. 17. Plutarch, Lives (1603), 16–19. 18. Chambers, “Ideas,” 168–69. 19. Tennenhouse, “Order,” 333. 20. Marcus, Shakespeare, 206. 21. Empson, Essays, 118. 22. Fitter, “Quarrel,” 157–58. Also see Merritt, Westminster, 225–26. 23. Sharpe, “Strain,” 200–202; Archer, Stability, 2–9. 24. Miller, “Topicality.” 25. Marcus, Shakespeare, 203–11. 26. BL Additional MS 48066, 5v–6r. 27. Huffman, Context, 139–50, 181– 82, 221–22. But, for the nearly inaudible contemporary revival of republicanism in Jacobethan

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Notes to Pages 160–172

England, see Peltonen, Republicanism, 51–87. 28. Walter, “Rising,” 101. 29. Martin, “Revolt,” 33–36. 30. Wilson, “Grain.” Consult George, Coriolanus, 272–73, for one nineteenth-century aesthetic explanation of Coriolanus’s contempt. As for the play’s aristocratic bias, discussions of “negative libertarianism” and “paternalistic centralization” in Cefalu, “Absolutism,” 1–34, seem to me far less clear and less compelling than the arguments against the playwright’s identification with “rigidified class antagonisms” and with “embattled transitional ideologies.” 31. OQC, MS 280, 167v. 32. Cf. Patterson, Voice, 143. 33. George, “Insurrection,” 124. 34. Luther, Werke, 412. 35. Petrarch, Invectiva, 15. 36. Calvin, Institution (1581), 356r–57r (4.3.15–4.4.2). 37. Kaufman, Laity, 43–47. 38. de Loque, Treatise (1581), 39. 39. Briefe and Plaine Declaration (1584), 120–21. 40. Bodl. MS Ashmole 383, 81v. 41. Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 125–29. 42. BL, Lansdowne MS 17, 197r. 43. Calvin, Institution, 228v–29r (3.7.10). 44. BL, Egerton MS 2877, 30v. For criticisms of the confessional, see Travers, Answere (1583), 283–85. 45. Greenham, Workes (1605), 268. 46. Grindal’s 1576 letter to Elizabeth is printed in Strype, Grindal (1821), 561–63. 47. Collinson, Movement, 366–67; Kaufman, Laity, 132–35.

48. Strype, Grindal, 568 and 572. For “full persuasion,” see CCCC, MS 121, 149. 49. Kaufman, “Prophesying”; Lake, “Tale,” 129–42. 50. Paget, Sermon (1583), A8r–B6v. 51. BL, Lansdowne MS 23, 20r. 52. BL, Additional MS 22473, 19v–20r. 53. LPL, MS 2006, 248r. 54. Penry, Treatise (1590), E3v–E4r and H4r. 55. Gilby, Dialogue, E8v–F8r. 56. Gifford, Discourse (1598), 11–17, 27–29, 43–44, 80–90. 57. Gifford, Discourse, 3–4 (“intollerable pride”) and 101 (“limits”); Gifford, Reply (1591), 18 (“anabaptisticall freedom”). 58. Gifford, Discourse, 130–31. Gifford’s opinions on lay reclamation are shrewdly sifted in McGinnis, Gifford, 135–62. 59. Gifford, Discourse, A3v. 60. Dent, Path-Way (1637), 145–46 (“despised” and “impudent”) and 224–27 (“cause to mourne”). 61. See ibid., 266–69, for complacency, and 413–15 for “exaltation.” 62. Sutcliffe, Discipline (1590), 186–91. 63. Whitgift, Works (1851), 446–47. 64. Bodl. MS Tanner 79, 137r. For articles against Thomas Cartwright’s antiauthoritarianism, see OQC, MS 280, 172v. Catholic polemicists similarly and predictably underscored reformed religion’s “factious practice,” suggesting that “evangelicall libertie” meant near constant quarreling; for example, see Wright, Articles (1600), B4r. 65. Fenner, Defence (1587), 70–71.

66. See GHL, MS 4415/1, 32r, for churchwardens’ “discretion” and distributions at St. Olave’s, Old Jewry, and Bownde, Unbeleefe (1608), 66, for the counterintuitive pastoral counsel on simultaneously giving money away and “inrich[ing]” oneself. 67. BL, Harleian MS 6539, 76v. 68. Hooker, Laws, 1.1.1. 69. DWL, Morrice MSS B.1, 468, and C, 413; Fenner, Sacra Theologia (1586), 105v–106r. 70. BL, Additional MS 28571, 193r. 71. BL, Lansdowne MS 30B, 211r. 72. BL, Cotton MS Titus C VI, 19v–20v. 73. Hooker, Laws, 8.6.8. 74. Ibid., 1.16.5–7. Also see Voak, Hooker, 97–98, 167–70, 196–216; Collinson, “Hooker,” 177–78; and Perrott, “Hooker,” 56–60. 75. Bilson, Governement (1593), 356–59. 76. Bilson, Difference (1585), A2v–A3r. 77. BL, Stowe MS 424, 164r. 78. Bancroft, Positions (1593), 139. 79. Bilson, Governement, 182 (“it cannot bee prooved”), 368 (“no proof”). 80. Bilson, Difference, 191–92. 81. BL, Harleian MS 677, 107v. 82. BL, Harleian MS 7042, 91. 83. Lamentable Complaint (1593), 206–23, 242–43. 84. Perkins, “Vocations” (1616), 768–76. 85. Kumin, Community, 248–55; Kaufman, Laity, 76–89. 86. Synodalia (1842), 122–23. 87. Lake and Questier, Lewd Hat, 584. Also see Kronenfeld, Lear, 150–51; Duffy, Morebath, 30–32; Kaufman, Laity, 167–69; and Merritt, Westminster, 252–56.

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88. Penry, Discovery (1590), 47. 89. Collinson, Religion, 199–201. 90. Duffy, “Multitude”; Watt, Print, 322–30. 91. Rogers, Treatises (1605), 413. 92. Compare Hammer, “Shakespeare’s Richard II,” 22–23, and Bate, Soul, 278–81. 93. LMA, PR 92/Sav/450, 404. 94. Ibid., 414. 95. Merritt, Westminster, 109–11. 96. Stow, Survey of the Cities (1720), 9–10. Co nclu si o n 1. Shapiro, Year, 332. But Hammer, “Shakespeare’s Richard II,” 32–34, argues that the play could not have been taken at the time as an “unalloyed endorsement” of either Bolingbroke’s deposition of King Richard II in 1399 or of Essex’s misadventure the week after the performance was commissioned in 1601. 2. In the play, King Richard’s councillors are “noisome weeds without profit” (3.4.38–39). 3. For the coup, consult Dickinson, Court Politics, and Gajda, Earl of Essex. Dickinson suggests (77–78) that the fears motivating Essex’s faction were unfounded, that the earl’s nemesis, Robert Cecil, had not organized his partisans and was not enthusiastic about the Habsburg candidate to succeed Elizabeth. Essex, on that count, Gajda contends (186), indulged in “scaremongering.” 4. Mayer, Faith, 127. 5. Ibid., 118.

{  220  } 

Notes to Pages 184–190

6. Streete, Protestantism, 166. The pseudonymous Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England has been attributed to others, but the consensus is that Persons wrote it “to create a sense of confusion and impending crisis,” using the dedication to sew doubts about Devereux’s loyalties; see Lake, “King,” 244–46. Also see Persons, Conference (1594), B1r, to corroborate the claim of our first chapter that, of the issues that raked political questions into the religion around Shakespeare, “none was treated so largely and so seriously as was the matter of succession and competitors to the Crown.” 7. Bacon, Declaration (1601), D3v. 8. Digges, Motives (1601), 28. 9. Gajda, Earl of Essex, 120. 10. Marcus, Shakespeare, 45–46. 11. For general remarks on exile and militancy, see Janssen, “Counter-Reformation,” 681–82. 12. Gajda, “Debating War,” 865–66. 13. Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare, 11. 14. Wordin, Sound of Virtue, 50–53. I use “Netherlands” and “Low Countries” interchangeably. The former term was increasingly popular from the 1560s, although the English, then and during the next decades, commonly referred to the seventeen provinces that sent deputies to the Low Countries’ States-General as “Flanders.” 15. Judith Pollmann, Catholic Identity, 75–76, calls the reorganization “eminently sensible.” 16. Hageman, Kwade Exempel, 252. An account of the opening phases

of Alba’s war, described by Thomas Churchyard, probably circulated long before its publication as A Lamentable and Pitifull Description of the Wofull Warres in Flaunders. See Churchyard, Lamentable (1578), especially 44–50. For Alba’s repressiepolitiek, consult Andriessen, “Katholieken,” 62–63, and images of Alba as God’s “rod” in Horst, Opstand, 92–94 and 102. 17. de Meij, Watergeuzen, 180, 269–70. 18. Relations politiques (1888), 321–59. 19. Arnade, Beggars, 234. 20. Mörke, Wilhelm van Oranien, 148–50. 21. See the letter from Jan van Nassau to Philips van Marnix, May 7, 1575, in Onuitgegevin briefwisseling, 23. 22. Leicester to Francis Walsingham, August 29, 1578, SP 83/8, 55. 23. Mears, “Love-Making,” 453–58. 24. Bacon to Francis Walsingham, July 29, 1578, BL, Harleian MS 168, 94v–95r. 25. For Catherine’s efforts with Anjou, see King Henry III’s letter to Louis Chasteignier de la Roche-Posay, September 1, 1578, in Lettres de Henri III, 67. 26. Richmond, “Shakespeare’s Navarre,” 211–17. 27. Adams, “Decision,” 22–26; Gajda, “Debating War,” 853–54; Janssen, “Counter-Reformation,” 689–90.

28. Honan, Shakespeare, 124–25. 29. For 2 Henry VI’s confrontations between commoners and king, see Levine, “Lawful Symmetry,” 211–15. 30. Yonger, Sermon (1600), D7r–E1r. 31. Huw Roberts (1598), quoted in Mears, “Counsel,” 16. 32. Shapiro, Year, 178–87. 33. Strier, Unrepentant Renaissance, 103. For surveillance and suppression, see Manley, “Strange’s Men,” 254–63. 34. Marx, “Pacifism,” 70–71, 87. 35. Tyacke, “Paradigm,” 533. 36. Knapp, “Preachers,” 35–39. 37. Poole, Radical Religion, 37–41. 38. Griffin, “Marring,” 373; Shell, Shakespeare, 145–46. 39. Davies, “Calvinism,” 266. 40. Ibid., 278. 41. Frye, Doctrine, 182–84. 42. Baker, Religion, 83–84; Battenhouse, Dimension, 157–60. 43. Hazlitt, Works, 46–47. 44. I borrow the term “added boosts” from Duncan-Jones, “Debt,” which used it to describe Philip Sidney’s debts to the religion around him. 45. Fitter, “Quarrel,” 154. 46. Auden, Poems, 101. 47. Chambers, Stage, 4:338–39. 48. Smith, Sermons (1593), 602. 49. Wilson, Secret, 294–99. 50. Santayana, Interpretations, 163.

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index

absolution, 67, 103, 133, 139 Alba, Duke of (Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo), 190–91, 220–21 n. 16 Alençon, Duke of. See Valois, François Hercule d’ Allen, Giles, 77 Alleyn, Edward, 186 All Is True (Fletcher and Shakespeare), 97–98 All Souls’ (Luddington), 51 Anabaptists, 3, 72, 108, 113, 175 Andrewes, Lancelot, 72–73, 100–101 James I and, 43, 69 Angelo (fictional character), 120, 145–49, 150–53, 215 n. 117, 216–17 n. 79 Anjou, duke of. See Valois, François Hercule d’ Apologie (Devereux), 32 appellants, 15, 37, 38–39, 206 n. 146 Aquaviva, Claudio, 140 Arnade, Peter, 191 Arnold, Oliver, 217–18 n. 6 Arthington, Henry, 72 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury (fictionalization), 197 Aubrey, John, 60–61 Auden, W. H., 197 Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius,149 Aylmer, John, Bishop of London, 62–63, 104, 107 on dissidents, 18–19, 55, 59–60, 70 on episcopacy, 14–15

Babington, Gervase, 70 Bacon, Francis, 73, 188 Bacon, Nicholas, 27, 192 Bagshaw, Christopher, 31 Bale John, 90 Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, Archbishop of Canterbury, 38, 74, 76, 114, 197, 207 n. 159 criticisms of reformists, 15, 55, 71, 109, 119, 180, 182 defense of episcopacy, 117–18 on Jesuits, 25, 26, 37 Whitgift and, 15, 35–36, 113–14, 119 Bankside, 48, 79, 114 Barlow, William, 74–75 Barton, Richard, 51–52, 53 Bate, Jonathan, 91, 145, 155 Beale, Robert, 120 Bearman, Robert, 50 Beaufort, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, Cardinal 117, 195 in 1 Henry VI, 96–98 Becket, Thomas à, Archbishop of Canterbury, 48, 137 Beckwith, Sarah, 217 n. 79 Benson, Peter, 83 Bevington, David, 202–3 n. 11 Beza, Theodore, 124–25 Bible, 42, 106, 108, 124, 132–33, 181 Deuteronomy, 90 Gospel of Matthew, 90, 143 Romans, 92 translations of, 65, 207 n. 159

Bilson, Thomas, 70, 82 on religious authority, 102, 117–18, 180–81, 182 bishops, 11, 14–16, 104, 106, 108, 115–16, 121, 177, 194 calls for removal of, 35, 206 n. 27 ecclesiastical commissions and, 102, 113, 213 n. 39 Elizabeth and, 99, 102, 119 excommunication powers of, 102 James I and, 42–43, 119 laity and, 100, 174 popular dissent against, 102–3, 118–19, 120 reformist criticism of, 13, 16–17, 35, 99–101, 104, 112, 114, 120, 174–75, 195, 214 n. 83 refugees appointed as, 98–99 Shakespeare’s depiction of, 95–97, 119–20, 196 Whitgift’s defense of, 35, 54, 106, 108, 114, 177 Blackfriars, 76, 114 Chapel Children, 85 sermons at, 71, 123–24 Shakespeare and, 48, 85–86, 123 Blackwell, George (Archpriest), 37–38, 45 Bluet, Thomas, 38 Blunt, Thomas, 52–53 Boleyn, Anne, 7 Bourgchier, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury (fictionalization), 95–96 Bownde, Nicholas, 128–30 Bretchgirdle, John, 52 Briefe and Plaine Declaration, 170–71 Brown, Nancy, 143 Browne, Robert, 149 Broxup, William, 144 Bruhn, Karen, 144 Brutus (fictionalization), 159–60, 163–64 Bunny, Edmund, 135, 136–39 Burbage, James, 123

Burbage, Richard, 77 Burghley, Lord. See Cecil, William Cade, Anthony, 129 Cade, Jack (fictionalization), 158, 162–63, 182 Cadiz, 33, 36, 44, 73, 74 Calvin, John, 169–70, 171, 172 Calvinism, 8, 9, 69–70, 130–31, 137, 170. See also puritans and puritanism Campion, Edmund, 2, 28 Cartwright, Thomas, 34, 55, 56, 59, 71 criticisms of bishops, 16–17, 35 Throckmorton and, 3–4, 55 Whitgift and, 54, 105–6, 108 Catesby, Robert, 43–44 Catherine de Medici, 21, 22, 23, 192 Catholics and Catholicism, 8–9, 28–29, 92, 124, 207 n. 148 Bunny’s criticisms of, 137, 138 Cardinal Wolsey and, 97–98 Robert Cecil and, 39–40, 44, 45 Crashaw’s attacks on, 66–69 Earl of Essex and, 188–89 Elizabeth and, 21, 39 Elizabeth’s excommunication and, 16, 57, 90, 137 Guiscard, 29 James I and, 28, 38, 39–42, 89–90 Jesuit missionaries viewed by, 4, 58 lay support, 38, 65, 133, 135 Mariolatry and, 68, 143–44 Measure for Measure as satire on, 67, 198 papal deceit charged, 8, 93–94 persecution of, 9, 26–27, 29–30, 133–34 Persons and, 133–36 Philip II of Spain and, 21, 32, 189 Privy Council and, 20, 27, 39, 56–57, 89 sacraments of, 10, 40, 64, 69 sermons against, 63–65, 69, 79–80, 209 n. 65

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Catholics and Catholicism (cont’d) Shakespeare and, 1–2, 49–50, 56–58, 59, 87–88, 198, 202 n. 2 Spanish armada and, 29–31 Whitgift and, 48, 104–5, 106 Cecil, Robert, 37, 43 Earl of Essex and, 36, 74, 75, 206 n. 136 and English Catholics, 39–40, 44, 45 Cecil, Thomas, 37 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley 39, 107, 110 Earl of Leicester and, 33, 54 Mary Stuart and, 20, 21, 24 Wiggington and, 111–12 censorship, 1–2, 103, 166, 167, 173, 194 Chambers, R. W., 163 Chardon, John, 99–100 charity, 80, 138, 147 Charke, William, 26 Charles IX, King of France, 23 Christian “clearing,” 124–30, 151 Churchyard, Thomas, 221 n. 16 Claudio (fictional character), 145, 146 Clement VII, Pope 137 Coke, Edward, 45 Colleton, John, 38 Collinson, Patrick, 7, 104, 111, 119, 184, 205 n. 91 The Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 51 Communion, 35, 109–10, 171 “Complaynt of St. Peter” (Southwell), 143–44 confessionals, 44, 136 “conformist,” term, 10–11 consistories conformists’ opposition to, 35, 113, 114, 170, 177 James I’s fears about, 42 reformists’ advocacy of, 170, 178–79 Coriolanus (Shakespeare), 159–69, 171, 218 n. 30 Brutus and Sicinius, 159–60, 163–64

{  248  } 

index



censors and, 166, 167 depiction of crowd, 158, 159–65, 166–68, 175, 183–85 first performances, 158–59, 183, 184 London 1980s staging, 162 Menenius, 159, 185 Cornwallis, William, 127 corruption, 18, 37, 61, 71, 111, 123, 139 grace and, 131, 132 Rome seen as center of, 45, 67 Shakespeare’s depiction of, 95 Cosin, Richard, 70 Hacket episode, 72, 154–55 Whitgift and, 112–13 Cottom, John, 51, 56 Coventry, 10, 34, 203 n. 10 Cox, John, 57 Cox, Richard, Bishop of Ely, 24 Cranmer, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, 19, 170, 183 Crashaw, William, 69, 149 Perkins and, 63, 66, 209 n. 65 Shakespeare and, 67–68 on the theater, 61–62 Crocket, Thomas, 53 Cromwell, Thomas, 92 Daniell, David, 78 David, King, 128–29, 140, 181 Davies, Michael, 195–96, 202 n. 11 de Granada, Luis, 139 Dent, Arthur, 131, 142, 151, 176 Dering, Edward, 109, 132–33, 171 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 32–34 beheading of, 37 and Catholicism, 188–89 Robert Cecil’s rivalry with, 36, 74, 75, 206 n. 136 Elizabeth and, 33, 36, 187 failed coup attempt, 74, 187, 189 funeral eulogy for, 74–75 and Ireland, 33, 36–37, 73, 193 Privy Council and, 33, 36, 189 and religious reformers, 34, 73–74, 188, 206 n. 121

and Spain, 32–33, 188–89, 193 works: Apologie, 32 Diehl, Huston, 121, 150–51 Digges, Thomas, 75–76 Donatists, 38, 149–50 Don John of Austria, 23 Downame, George, Bishop of Derry 115–16, 117, 214 n. 101 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 32 Cartwright and, 3, 54 and Dutch rebellion, 48, 191, 192–93 Elizabeth and, 23, 24 patron of puritans, 54, 56, 73, 105 Shakespeare and, 48, 189–90, 205 n. 112 Duncan-​Jones, Katherine, 103, 190 ecclesiastical commissions, 102, 103, 113, 213 n. 39 Edward VI, 19 Egerton, Stephen, 41, 76, 82, 86, 132 Bancroft’s criticisms of, 71–72 on “Christian clearing,” 124, 126 sermons, 12, 123–24 Elizabeth I, 107, 118, 131, 152, 188, 205 n. 110 and bishops, 99, 102, 119 and Catholics, 21, 39 courtships, 21–22, 23–25, 191–92, 204 n. 79 and Dutch rebellion, 191–93 Earl of Essex and, 33, 36, 187 and Mary Stuart, 20–21, 22, 28 and obedience, 8, 21, 57 papal excommunication, 16, 57, 90, 137 and preaching, 16, 173 and religious reformists, 18, 24–25 and succession, 7–8, 16, 18, 19–20, 25 Empson, William, 164 episcopacy, 11, 18, 66, 120, 121, 177, 194 Aylmer on, 14–15 Bancroft on, 117–18



Downame on, 115–16, 214 n. 101 Whitgift on, 35, 54, 106, 108, 114, 177 Essays (Montaigne), 127 Essex, Earl of. See Devereux, Robert Falstaff, Sir John (fictional character), 145, 195–96 Fant, Nicholas, 110 Farnese, Alexander, Duke of Parma 29, 30, 192 Fawkes, Guy, 43–44 Fenn, Humphrey, 34, 55 Fenner, Dudley, 14, 51, 109 on laity and church authority, 177–78, 182 Ferry, Anne, 128 Field, John, 55, 107, 131, 154 Field, Richard, 62, 85, 113 Fincham, Kenneth, 43, 104 Fitter, Chris, 165, 197 Fleetwood, Edward, 57 Fletcher, John, 97–98 Fletcher, Richard, 18 Floyd John, 61–62 Fox, Alistair, 118 France, 19, 189, 195 Husbands for Elizabeth, 21, 22, 23–25, 191–92 massacre of Huguenots in, 22–23, 84 and Netherlands, 190, 191, 192 Frye, Roland Mushat, 196 Fulke, William, 105 Gajda, Alexandra, 189 Garnet, Henry, 44, 53, 208 n. 19 Gifford, George, 34, 126, 149–50, 175–76 Gilbert, George, 133 Gilby, Anthony, 54–55, 59, 81, 98, 161 criticisms of church authorities, 18, 56, 174–75 Gless, Darryl, 153 Globe Theater, 3, 77–78, 79, 85, 145, 186

i n d e x   { 

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Gloucester (diocese), 105 Gosson, Stephen, 131 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de, Cardinal, 190 Greenblatt, Stephen, 85, 153, 157, 217 n. 95 Greenham, Richard, 11, 115, 125, 130, 143, 145, 161, 172 Grene, Nicholas, 97 Gresham, Thomas, 61 Grindal, Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury 16–17, 107, 135 and prophesying, 18, 172–73 Groves, Beatrice, 91, 212 n. 1 Guiscard Catholics, 29 Guy, John, 28 Hacket, William, 71–72, 75, 153–54, 155 Hall, Edward, 193 Hall, John, 86 Hall, Peter, 162 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 2, 121, 125–27, 140, 142, 145, 151 Hammer, Paul, 36, 74, 220 n. 1 Hampton Court conference (1604), 42, 43 Harison, Anthony, 103 Harrington, John, 101 Hastings, Henry, Earl of Huntington, 54 Hathaway, Anne, 52 Hatton, Christopher, 177 Hazlitt, William, 197 Heal, Felicity, 15, 104, 214 n. 83 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, 43 Henry III, King of France 23, 192 Henry IV, King of France, 89 Henry V, King of England (fictionalization), 195–96 Henry V (Shakespeare), 37, 87–88, 195 Henry VI, King of England (fictionalization), 97 Henry VI, part 1 (Shakespeare), 96–97 Henry VI, part 2 (Shakespeare), 158, 162–63, 195–96

{  250  } 

index

Henry VIII, King of England, 7, 56, 66, 92, 137 Henslowe, Philip, 186 Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers, 38–39, 206 n. 146 Hill, Adam, 61, 115, 153 Hoghton, Alexander, 56–57 Holinshed, Raphael, 96, 97, 193 Holland, Richard, 56 Holstun, James, 4, 83 Holy Trinity church (Stratford), 3, 51–52, 86 Honan, Park, 85, 90–91, 193, 211 n. 147 Hooker, Richard, 178, 179–80 Hooper, John, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, 174 Horne, Robert, Bishop of Winchester, 8 Howard, Charles, Lord Admiral, 33 Howard, Philip, Earl of Arundel, 9 Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, 20, 21 Howson, John, 99–100 Huffman, Clifford, 166 Huguenots, 22–23, 84 Hunt, Arnold, 76, 203 n. 18, 207 n. 148 Hunt, Maurice, 151 Hunt, Simon, 50–51 Hutton, Matthew, Archbishop of York, 105 idolatry, 9, 63, 65, 66–67, 98, 136, 214 n. 89 calls for repudiation of, 64, 124 Innocent III, Pope 90, 91 Ireland, 8 Earl of Essex and, 33, 36–37, 73, 193 Spain and, 44, 73 Isabella (fictional character), 2, 145, 146, 147–48, 149, 197 James, William, 70, 76 James I, 84, 165, 171 becomes king of England, 37 and bishops, 42–43, 119 and Catholics, 28, 38, 39–42, 89–90



as king of Scotland (James VI), 28 new Bible translation commissioned by, 207 n. 159 reformist disappointment in, 43, 75, 82, 152 and succession, 37, 214 n. 83 theological interests of, 69, 152 Janelle, Pierre, 143, 144 Jenkins, Thomas, 50–51 Jesuits and Jesuit missionaries, 39, 136, 138, 143, 144 Alleged treachery, 26, 44, 204 n. 83, 205 n. 91 Bancroft on, 25, 26, 37 Catholic reactions to, 4, 58 evangelical ethos of, 127–28 capture and interrogation, 31–32, 26, 27–28, 52–53, 63 papal authority and, 37–38, 90, 137 Shakespeare and, 49 Southwell and, 139, 140 Spanish armada and, 31–32 Jewel, John,Bishop of Salisbury, 98–99 John, King of England, 90, 91–92, 94 Jones, Jeffrie, 53 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 77 Katherine of Aragon, 7–8 Kermode, Frank, 159 King Johan (Bale), 90 King John (Shakespeare), 90–95 Troublesome Reign of King John, relation to, 92 King Lear (Shakespeare), 67, 88 King’s Men, 42, 85–86. See also Lord Chamberlain’s Men Knapp, Jeffrey, 103 Knollys, Francis, 119 “Lagrime di San Pietro” (Tansillo), 143 laity and lay authority, 9, 35, 38, 64, 169 bishops and, 100, 174 Calvinists’ view of, 170 and Catholicism, 38, 65, 133, 135



conformist fears of, 114, 118, 135, 176–77, 179–81 consistories and, 42, 170, 178–79 Coriolanus on, 159, 160 Dent and, 176 Gifford and, 175–76 lay lectors, 10 parish elections and, 181–82, 183 participatory parish regimes, 170–71, 172, 180, 182, 184 reformist arguments about, 172, 175, 176–77, 178 and St. Saviour’s lawsuit, 186 Lake, Peter, 15, 35, 70, 183, 188, 214 n. 101 on Measure for Measure, 120–21, 147, 153 Langton, Stephen, 91 Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 174 Leicester, Earl of. See Dudley, Robert Leicestershire, 18, 55 Lever, Thomas, 10, 203 n. 10 Leveson, Richard, 44 Levine, David, 147 liturgy, 35, 53, 69, 109, 121, 123 London, 65–66, 83, 113 crowds in, 157, 163, 167 popular protests in, 165–66 Shakespeare in, 47–48, 60–61, 78, 81, 167, 211 n. 147 theater districts, 114 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, 77 Essex coup and, 74, 187–88, 189, 220 n. 1 See also King’s Men Love’s Labors Lost (Shakespeare), 51, 78, 192 Loyola, Ignatius, 127–28, 139 Lucy, Thomas, 48 Luther, Martin, 72, 169 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 62, 67 Malvolio (fictional character), 145 Marcus, Leah, 5, 87, 152, 189 on Coriolanus, 164, 166

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Margaret of Parma, 190 Mariolatry, 68, 143–44 Marprelate, Martin, 15, 70, 75, 117, 154, 194–95, 196 Martz, Louis, 143 Marx, Steven, 194 Mary I, Queen of England (Mary Tudor), 7–8, 19, 20, 29 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 16, 19 conspiracies by and around, 23–24, 27, 28, 29, 56 Elizabeth and, 20–21, 22, 28 reception in England, 20, 21, 25, 28 and succession, 19–20 Matthew, Tobie, Bishop of Durham, 26, 41, 101 Maxey, Anthony, 76–77, 132 Mayer, Jean-​Christophe, 187–88 McDermott, James, 29 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 212 n. 1 Angelo in, 120, 145–49, 150–51, 215 n. 117, 216–17 n. 79 Isabella in, 2, 145, 146–47 as satire on Catholicism and Calvinism, 67, 120–21, 147–49, 198 Vincentio in, 145, 151–53 Mendoza, Bernard de, 25 The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 196 Midlands revolt (1607), 167–68 Mildmay, Walter, 9 Miller, Shannon, 165 Milton, Anthony, 89 Milton, John, 197 Milward, Peter, 145 Miola, Robert, 208 n. 19 Montaigne, Michel de, 127 More, Thomas, 51, 103, 213 n. 43 Mörke, Olaf, 191 Morrice, James, 113 Morton, John, Bishop of Ely, Archbishop of Canterbury, 103 Mountjoy, Christopher, 84–85, 113 Munday, Anthony, 90

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Netherlands, 220 n. 14 church practices in, 113–14 England and, 191–93 France and, 190–92 rebellion against Spain, 23, 29, 48, 190–94 Neville, Charles,Earl of Westmorland, 8, 9 Nicholl, Charles, 81, 211 n. 147 Nichols, Josias, 12, 72 Norfolk (diocese), 18, 132 Norfolk, Duke of. See Howard, Thomas Northbrooke, John, 61 Norton, Thomas, 8–9 Nuttall, A. D., 216–17 n. 79 obedience, 38, 65, 108, 176 Catholic hierarchy and, 39 conscience and, 9 Elizabeth and, 8, 21, 57 O’Neill, Hugh, 36 Othello (Shakespeare), 67 Overton, William, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 155 Paget, Eusebius, 18, 34, 81, 82, 101, 173 parishes commoners’ role in, 179, 182 participatory regimes, 170–72, 177, 180–84 pluralism and absenteeism, 13–14, 101, 107 size of, 14 See also laity and lay authority Parker, Matthew, Archbishop of Canterbury, 18 Parma, Duke of. See Farnese, Alexander Patterson, Annabel, 161 Paule, George, 101 Paul the Apostle, 100, 132, 171, 178 penance, 53, 64, 139, 202 n. 8 Penry, John, 117, 118, 174 Perkins, William, 112, 129, 182, 209 n. 64 antipapal polemics, 63–65, 93, 209 n. 65

Persons, Robert, 38, 140, 188 Bunny and, 135, 136–37, 138–39 works: Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England, 188, 220 n. 6; Directory, 133–36, 139 Peter the Apostle, 90, 93, 142–44, 178 Peterborough, 54, 101, 105 Philip II, King of Spain, 20, 190 English Catholics’ hope in, 21, 32, 189 armada sent by, 29–30, 193 Philip II, King of France (fictionalization), 91, 93, 95 Philips, Edward, 78–81, 82 Phillips, John, 131–32 Piers, John, Bishop of Salisbury, 214 n. 89 pietists, 11, 121, 128, 145, 149, 152 Pilgrimage of Grace, 56 Pilkington, James, Bishop of Durham, 21 Pius V, Pope, 16, 57, 90, 137 plague, 80, 81, 85, 128 Plutarch, 157, 163, 167, 171, 175, 185 “powder plot” (1605), 16, 43–46, 89 Powell, Gabriel, 94 Prayer Book (Book of Common Prayer), 9, 35, 60, 81, 112 reformist critics of, 11, 34, 41, 63, 107, 109, 110, 172 presbyterianism, 177, 180–81, 184, 195 Prior, Charles, 11 Privy Council, 21, 84, 102, 105, 112, 119, 172, 192, 194 on English Catholics, 20, 27, 39, 56–57, 89 and Essex, 33, 36, 189 on reformist preachers, 17–18, 41 Whitgift and, 15, 104, 107 prophesying and prophecies, 17–18, 19, 54, 172–73 purgatory, 35, 49, 68, 136, 138, 202 n. 8 puritans and puritanism, 51, 121, 147, 153 and discipline, 146, 150, 153



Dudley’s patronage of, 54, 56, 73, 105 emphasis on sermons, 11–12, 203 n. 18 Shakespeare and, 54, 145–49, 198 social leveling and, 183 usage of term, 11 See also Calvinism and Calvinists

Questier, Michael, 89–90, 109, 143, 144 Quiney, Thomas, 86 Randolph, Thomas, 19 “reformist,” term, 11 refugees, 23, 98–99, 114, 170 Shakespeare and, 84–85, 113 Regnans in Excelsis (Pius V), 16, 57, 90, 137 repentance, 11, 53, 82, 125, 128, 140, 153, 184 Bownde on, 129–30 Dent on, 142, 151, 176 Persons on, 134–35, 136 self-​incrimination, 79, 133, 151, 184, 206 n. 121 Richard II, King of England, 188 Richard II (Shakespeare), 74, 95, 187–88, 197 Richard III, King of England, 103 Richard III (Shakespeare), 95–97, 103, 213 n. 43 Richmond, Hugh, 192 Rogers, Richard, 128 Rogers, Thomas, 29 Rose, Jacqueline, 114 sacraments, 82, 104, 133, 139, 202 n. 8 Catholic, 10, 40, 64, 69 sermons and, 12, 13, 109–10 Sampson, Thomas, 98 Sander, Nicholas, 8 Sandys, Edwin, Bishop of London, Archbishop of York, 17, 48, 99, 107, 109, 111 Santayana, George, 198

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Scory, John, Bishop of Chichester, 99 sermons, 82, 182 against Catholicism, 63–65, 69, 209 n. 65 conformist-​reformist debate in, 14, 75–77 Elizabeth’s effort to limit, 16, 173 itinerant preachers, 10, 53, 113, 115 prophesying and, 17–18, 173–74 reformist emphasis on, 11–12, 14, 53–54, 60, 172, 173–74, 203 n. 18 sacraments and, 12-13, 109–10 theater condemned in, 61–63, 79, 209 n. 59 Whitgift on, 12–13 Shakeshafte, William, 56, 57 Shakespeare, John, 48–50, 59, 60 Shakespeare, Mary Arden, 48 Shakespeare, Susanna, 86 Shakespeare, William baptism, 52 birth, 47 and Blackfriars, 48, 85–86, 123 as businessman, 77, 83 caricatures by, 146–48, 197 and Catholicism, 1–2, 56–58, 59, 87–88, 198, 202 n. 2 and censorship, 103 church attendance, 52, 81, 83, 211 n. 136 and church hierarchy, 55, 119–20, 194 on commoners and crowds, 157–58, 169 Crashaw and, 67–68 Dudley and, 48, 189–90, 205 n. 112 and Dutch revolt, 193, 194 Earl of Essex and, 37, 74 emigrés, refugees and, 84–85, 113 and established church, 2, 150–51, 202 n. 4 eye for the absurd, 78, 145, 198 Garnet and, 53, 208 n. 19 and Globe Theater, 85, 186 and Hampton Court, 42

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history plays, 95, 98, 193, 194, 207 n. 148, 213 n. 43 in Lancashire (?), 3, 56–57, 303 n. 5 lodgings, 57, 60–61, 78, 81, 84, 85–86, 113, 211 n. 147 in London, 47–48, 60–61, 78, 81, 167, 211 n. 147 Marprelate and, 195 marriage, 52, 59 Montaigne and, 127, 215 n. 9 parents, 48 and puritanism, 54, 145–49, 198 on religious controversies, 3, 4, 5, 56, 58–59, 71, 103, 155, 189, 198, 202 n. 11 at school, 50–51 Southwell and, 145 in Stratford, 47–48, 59, 86, 107–8, 189–90 and succession intrigues, 25, 191–92 Troublesome Reign of King John and, 92 Whitgift and, 48, 59, 108 will and testament of, 86, 87 Shakespeare, William, works All Is True (with Fletcher), 97–98 The Comedy of Errors, 51 Coriolanus, 159–69, 183–84, 185, 196, 218 n. 30 Hamlet, 2, 121, 125–27, 140, 142, 145, 151 Henry V, 37, 87–88, 195 Henry VI, part 1, 96–97 Henry VI, part 2, 158, 162–63, 195–96 Julius Caesar, 77 King John, 90–95 King Lear, 67, 88 Love’s Labors Lost, 51, 78, 192 Macbeth, 62, 67 Measure for Measure, 2, 67, 120–21, 145–49, 150–51, 198, 212 n. 1, 215 n. 117, 216–17 n. 79 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 196

Othello, 67 Richard II, 74, 95, 187–88, 197 Richard III, 95–97, 103, 213 n. 43 The Tempest, 58 Twelfth Night, 145, 196, 213 n. 42 Shapiro, James, 37, 127, 193–94 Sharpe, J. A., 118 Shell, Allison, 1, 202 n. 4, 209 n. 59 Shoreditch, 114 Shakespeare in, 47, 60–61 Shrank, Cathy, 161 Shuger, Debora, 145–46, 150, 153 Sicinius (fictionalization), 159–60, 163–64 Sidney, Philip, 32 Sixtus V, Pope, 29, 90 Smith, Henry, 62, 198 Smith, Thomas, 22–23 Southam, 18, 54 Southwark, 79 Shakespeare in, 77–78, 81 St. Saviour’s at, 3, 78, 80–81, 182–86 Southwell, Robert arrest and execution of, 140 on Saint Peter, 142–44 Shakespeare and, 145 on tears and suffering, 139, 140, 141, 142 works: “Complaynt of St. Peter,” 143–44; “Prodigall Child’s Soule Wracke,” 140–41 Southworthe, Christopher, 27–28 Spain Dutch rebellion against, 23, 48, 190–91, 192–93, 194 Earl of Essex and, 32–34, 188–89, 193 Ireland and, 44, 73 as threat to England, 32, 44, 90, 189, 191, 193–94, 205 n. 110 Spanish armada, 29–31, 33, 193 Spenser, Edmund, 31 Spiekerman, Tim, 95 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola), 127–28

Stachniewski, John, 130–31 St. Anne and St. Agnes, church of, 81 St. Alban, Wood Street, church of, 83, 211 n. 136 St. Alphage’s church (Cripplegate), 83 Stanhope, Edward, 104 Stanley, Ferdinando, 56–57, 208 n. 40 St. Botolph’s (Aldgate), 61, 104, 132 St. Helen’s (Bishopsgate), 60, 61, 78 Stirling, Brents, 158 Stockwood, John, 61 St. Olave’s church, Jewry, 81, 83 St. Olave’s, Silver Street, 83, 211 n. 136 Stow, John, 81, 157 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 48, 59, 92 St. Paul’s Cross, 17, 70, 71, 82, 99 Barlow’s sermon at, 74–75 Crashaw’s sermons at, 67, 68 Hill’s sermons at, 61, 153 Whitgift’s sermons at, 108, 110 St. Peter’s church (Bishopston), 51 Stratford, 3, 12–13 enclosures, 86 ministry in, 51–54 Shakespeare in, 47–48, 59, 86, 107–8, 189–90 Street, Peter, 77 Streete, Adrian, 188 Strier, Richard, 194 St. Saviour’s church (Southwark), 3, 78, 80, 81 vestry litigation at, 182–86 Stubbs, John, 24 succession, 3, 22 Elizabeth and, 7–8, 16, 18, 19–20, 25 James I and, 37, 214 n. 83 Shakespeare and, 25, 188, 191–92, 220 n. 6 Sutcliffe, Matthew, 56, 93, 147, 176–77 Sweeney, Anne, 141 Sydney, Philip, 24–25 Tansillo, Luigi, 143 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 58 Temple, Robert, 71

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Tennenhouse, Leonard, 164 theater attendance at, 161–62 censorship of, 77, 194 Globe, 3, 77–78, 79, 85, 145, 186 sermons against, 61–63, 79, 209 n. 59 Throckmorton, Job, 55–56, 59, 154 Cartwright and, 3–4, 55, 71 Tomson, Laurence, 124–25 Topsell, Edward, 132 Trent, Council of, 136 Tresham, Thomas, 25–26, 27 Trinity College, 105 The Troublesome Reign of King John, 92 Tudor, Mary. See Mary I, Queen of England Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 145, 196, 213 n. 42 Tyndale, William, 90 Tyrone, Earl of, 37, 73 Udall, John, 116–17 Valois, François Hercule d’ (Duke of Alençon, Duke of Anjou), 22–23, 24, 25, 191–92 Walsham, Alexandra, 30, 72 Walsingham, Francis, 27, 54 and Elizabeth’s courtships, 21, 22 and Mary Stuart, 21, 24, 28 Wars of the Roses, 193 Warwick, 52, 54, 105 Warwickshire, 3, 18, 155, 202 n. 5 Weis, René, 61 Weld, Humphrey, 83–84 Wentworth, Peter, 204 n. 79

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Wernham, R. B., 33 Westmorland. See Neville, Charles Weston, William, 37–38 White, Thomas, 71 Whitgift, John, Bishop of Worcester, Archbishop of Canterbury, 55, 62–63, 101, 116, 118–19, 146, 197 Bancroft and, 15, 35–36, 113–14, 119 on bishops and episcopacy, 35, 54, 106, 108, 114, 177 Cartwright and, 54, 105–6, 108 and Catholics, 48, 104–5, 106 Cosin and, 112–13 as “isolationist,” 113, 214 n. 89 on laity and lay authority, 177 and Privy Council, 15, 104, 107 purges of nonconformists, 41, 51, 70, 109, 110–11, 112 on sermons and preaching, 12–13 Shakespeare and, 48, 59, 108 as tyrant, 55, 110 in Worcester, 106–7, 108 Wigginton, Giles, 111–12 Wilcox, Thomas, 55, 131, 133, 170 Wilkins, George, 84 Willet, Andrew, 92 William I, Prince of Orange, 25, 190, 191, 192 Wilson, Richard, 9, 49, 58, 85, 168 Wingfield, Anthony, 32 Wolsey, Thomas, Archbishop of York, 97–98 Worcester (diocese), 52, 54, 105, 106–7 Wotton, Anthony, 75, 76 Wrightson, Keith, 147 Wyght, Daniel, 55 Younger, William, 193