Othello as Protestant Propaganda

You can tell things are going well when your students start teaching you. One of my students recently introduced me to this essay on 'Othello as Protestant Propaganda'.

If Iago is a reminder of Sant Iago, a duplicitous, Jesuitical character who also just happens to be a "Moor-slayer", then we have a rather different view of the play from the one we may be used to. Othello's "sword of Spain" from Act 5, Scene 2 gains a wider signification for a start.

If nothing else, such a reading provides a useful counterbalance to the glut of "Catholic" readings of Shakespeare that we have seen in recent years. Clearly Shakespeare was emerging from a Catholic world (and a Catholic family) but he emerged into one that was strongly Protestant.

Shakespeare and memories of Catholicism

I was in the happy position of attending a short lecture last week by Dr Gillian Woods from Birkbeck College, University of London, about whose new book I have written before.

In her lecture, Dr Woods pointed out that there is a surprising amount of Catholicism in Shakespeare's plays, given that the religion was proscribed. The Catholic references range from nuns and friars to pilgrims and pilgrimages, from swear words to "very Catholic metaphors" like the ones embedded in the famous sonnet constructed by Romeo and Juliet at their first meeting:

Romeo:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

Juliet:
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

Romeo:
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

Juliet:
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

Romeo:
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

Juliet:
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

Romeo:
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

What do we make then of what she called this "residue" or "memory of the faith that had been banned and rejected"? It seems clear that there were a range of options available to people in post-Reformation England, ranging from nostalgia to fear, from hatred to acceptance. Many of these responses appear in Shakespeare's plays. In fact, many of them appear within individual plays, creating a complex picture that needs to be read in a historically informed way.

Dr Woods used a helpful metaphor in her lecture, suggesting that the ways in which Catholicism is present in Shakespeare's plays are akin to the ways in which pre-Reformation wall paintings survived in the post-Reformation Church. Many were simply removed. Some were literally defaced (in order to make it clear that the Reformed Church in England was not just a new church but a rejection of the Old Church, that it was - in some sense - still in dialogue with it). And others were whitewashed, perhaps in the hope that they might one day be uncovered, though the images still seeped through. (The definitive work on all of this is Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars.)

I like this last metaphor in particular: we can see Catholicism seeping through the language and drama of Shakespeare's plays without having to get drawn into largely fruitless discussions about his own religious inclinations.

Dr Woods finished by discussing Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, a character whose pilgrimage raises all sorts of questions about faith within the play as well as among critics. The very complexity of her role seems to reflect the complexity of Shakespeare's response to the Old Faith, just as the play itself, in Dr Woods' fine phrase, reveals "the limitations of fiction and the inadequacies of real life."

Shakespeare and the Catholic Question

There has been renewed interest in Shakespeare and Catholicism in recent years. Particularly honourable mention ought to go to Dr Alison Shell of University College, London, Manchester University Press, which has brought out a number of interesting books, and Dr Thomas Rist. 

However, despite this surge of interest in the academy, there is still a sense in which the debate is only just beginning to get going, which is why this new book, due out in June, looks so interesting. Here's the publisher's blurb:

"Why does Catholicism have such an imaginative hold on Shakespearean drama, even though the on-going Reformation outlawed its practice? Shakespeare's Unreformed Fictions contends that the answers to this question are theatrical rather than strictly theological. Avoiding biographical speculation, this book concentrates on dramatic impact, and thoroughly integrates new literary analysis with fresh historical research. In exploring the dramaturgical variety of the 'Catholic' content of Shakespeare's plays, Gillian Woods argues that habits, idioms, images, and ideas lose their denominational clarity when translated into dramatic fiction: they are awkwardly 'unreformed' rather than doctrinally Catholic. Providing nuanced readings of generically diverse plays, this book emphasises the creative function of such unreformed material, which Shakespeare uses to pose questions about the relationship between self and other. A wealth of contextual evidence is studied, including catechisms, homilies, religious polemics, news quartos, and non-Shakespearean drama, to highlight how early modern Catholicism variously provoked nostalgia, faith, conversion, humour, fear, and hatred. This book argues that Shakespeare exploits these contradictory attitudes to frame ethical problems, creating fictional plays that consciously engage audiences in the difficult leaps of faith required by both theatre and theology. By recognizing the playfulness of Shakespeare's unreformed fictions, this book offers a different perspective on the interactions between post-Reformation religion and the theatre, and an alternative angle on Shakespeare's interrogation of the scope of dramatic fiction."

It's difficult to tell before seeing the book of course, but that sounds to me like a very interesting thesis.

The Royal Shakespeare Company and Catholicism

This week I saw and greatly enjoyed the RSC production of Measure for Measure. I had feared the worst, having read some pretty unfavourable reviews and some less than complimentary comments about Catholicism in the notes provided for teachers. However, it was fascinating to see Measure for Measure performed as a comedy first and as a Problem Play second.

Nevertheless, there were some curious moments, such as the nuns' and friars' first entries. They were chanting in a curious invented language. This is how Dave Price, the Music and Sound Designer explained his thinking:

"My job is to make sure that the music and sound helps with the storytelling: helps the audience to connect with the world that the story happens in. So, the Friars, for example, live in a harsh world, serving a God that they have to work hard for. They go out and minister to the people of Vienna, and minister therefore in a harsh environment, including the prison. So the style of singing for the Friars is inspired by Georgian music and the polyphonic singing tradition of that country. It is hard, bold, edged. I looked at Georgian prayers and wrote them out in English and then abstracted the words even further so that they are an invented language, with a focus on sounds that evoke the Friars rather than a specific language. The music for them is loud and overt. Whereas the music for the Nuns is inspired by Bulgarian music. It isn’t a cultural choice, more a stylistic choice. The words are an invented language again, but this time inspired by the sounds of the Polish language. I studied in Poland. I think we all draw on our own life experiences to create our work. I wanted something which would evoke the lives of the Poor Clares, who, unlike the Friars, live their lives completely shut away from the outside world. The Bulgarian tradition includes unaccompanied female singing, which resonates with the Poor Clare lifestyle, and the resonance in the production of sound feels like the resonance of the cloister. I looked at the research the company had done about the Poor Clare lifestyle and the music for the Nuns is inspired by that."

This is all very interesting but it did mean that the friars and nuns didn't sound like real friars or nuns.

I was reminded of the 2010 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which an actor paraded around the stage with an empty monstrance at various key moments during the play. I suppose this may have been a clever piece of symbolism designed to show how inter-family feuding had driven true religion from the city but, then again, it may have been a superficial and ill-conceived attempt to create a sense of time and place.

This might seem pretty unimportant but, as I've suggested before, it's difficult to sit on the fence when it comes to Measure for Measure, a play about a postulant nun and a duke who disguises himself as a friar. What we make of Catholicism fundamentally affects what we make of the play. Let's take two examples.

What do we make of the duke-friar's advice to Mariana in IV.i when encouraging her to trick Angelo into sleeping with her? "He is your husband on a pre-contract: / To bring you thus together 'tis no sin".

And what about his apparent breaking of the seal of the confessional in III.i? "Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt her; only he hath made an assay of her virtue to practise his judgment with the disposition of natures. ... I am Confessor to Angelo, and I know this to be true".

For any Catholic, these are pretty serious matters and so it would be difficult for any Catholic audience, I would suggest, to see the Duke as a benevolent deus ex machina. As many critics and directors have suggested, he seems to be more problem than solution. But that was not how he was presented in this production. The Duke was a likeable character who got his woman in the end.

However, it is entirely possible that the RSC in this production was closer in spirit to the original production than Catholics might like to think. Shakespeare's original audience (and Shakespeare himself) may well have shared the RSC's lack of respect for Catholic practice and belief. If that was the case then the duke's failings could much more easily have been played as comedy. Maybe seeing Measure for Measure as a Problem Play is a particularly Catholic approach to take.

P.S. The most useful of the RSC's notes for teachers can be found here.

P.P.S. Bess Twiston-Davies has some interesting things to say in this week's Catholic Herald about another of the RSC's current productions, The Heresy of Love.

'Measure for Measure' - a Catholic play with a Protestant ending?

A whole raft of critics have recently shown an interest in Shakespeare and Catholicism. Alison Shell, Professor of English at Durham University, for example, has argued that "the relationship between Shakespeare and Catholicism is an interesting one which has often been underplayed; that Shakespeare's life and works can usefully be discussed in the light of it; and that Shakespeare may well have come from a Catholic family, though this need not imply that he was a Catholic himself." It may, incidentally, be worth pointing out that Shell is an Anglican and so has no Catholic axe to grind.

Other critics have also emphasised the importance of seeing Shakespeare in his Catholic context. Thomas Rist , for example, has written some interesting books and articles about Shakespeare and Catholicism while Manchester University Press has published books about Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare  and Secret Shakespeare: Studies in theatre, religion and resistance .

Given all this interest, what do we make of Measure for Measure, a play about a nun (and a friar, or a duke disguised as a friar) in Catholic Vienna?  According to Ernest Honigmann in Shakespeare. The 'Lost Years' (Manchester, 1985), p.123, Measure for Measure "activates latent active anti-Catholic feelings - while at the same time it manages to present a Catholic point of view persuasively from the inside." Alison Findlay , writing from a quite different critical perspective, comes up with a similar conclusion: "To regard Measure for Measure as anti-monastic satire, where Isabella's ideas 'are meant to differ sharply from those of a largely Protestant audience', fails to take account of the ways in which women might share her point of view because of religious or feminist sympathies."

In many ways Isabella is indeed the play's most interesting character, which, on the face of it, is rather surprising. Shakespeare's ability to give the marginal a voice is, of course, part of what makes him great but Isabella was not only a woman but a Catholic and not only a Catholic but a nun.

The big question is whether she can remain a nun after the play ends: the Duke, still dressed as a friar, twice proposes marriage and Isabella remains silent both times. As Arthur F. Marotti has argued, this is the dramatic crux of the whole play. Does Isabella abandon her vocation for marriage or does she hold out? Is this a Catholic play with a Protestant ending, where the foolish Catholic woman realises the error of her ways?

Or is it, more subversively, a Protestant play with a Catholic ending? Catholic Vienna, as depicted in this play, is rampantly dissolute: a 17th Century Protestant audience would have lapped it up. But Isabella doesn't give them the answer they would have wanted. She remains silent. The play remains ambiguous. The Catholic option is still open.