Shakespeare, Humble & Ardent
Any Quest to Understand the Bard Requires Humility & Ardor by Michael Platt
If we knew who Shakespeare was, might it help us read his works? In "Shakespeare's Religion" (First Things, May 2008), Professor Robert Miola summed up the little that is known about Shakespeare's personal worship and reviewed the interesting, but mixed and inconclusive, inferences from the plays.
Shakespeare the man may have been a Catholic, but the record does not show it. The spaces between the dots in the life are, as Miola maintains, much wider than the dots, and some of the dots are not dots at all, but crumbs that scrupulous scholarly birds have eaten up before bold enthusiasts could trace their way back to safety, and so an impartial observer must, like a Scottish judge, declare, "not proven." It is a lonely stance.
Such a judge must stand on the defensive. Ordinarily in discussion, it is proper to ask: What evidence, if found, would change your view? (And if the man won't answer, there is no point in continuing discussion.) But in this case, such clinching evidence, a profession of lack of faith in Shakespeare's hand declaring, "I am not now, nor have I ever been a Catholic," is in the nature of the thing exceedingly unlikely. Listening to someone who believes that the silence of the record only means that Shakespeare's worship was secret, such a judge might think, "Improbable, but not impossible, also impossible to refute, and yet, as I said, 'not proven.'" However, if he notices that the more convinced the believer, the more wrought up in the case, and the more published, the less he will have considered opposing evidence, let alone looked for it—what believer cares to find out which whole play the Jesuits teaching English novices in Spain cut from the Second Folio?—what can he conclude but that "unexamined opinion rules the world." And to such a passionate believer, who "knows" who Shakespeare was and thus already knows what Shakespeare says, it will be in vain to point out that Shakespeare himself never says anything in all his works.
To be sure, this belief is not the only one based on this powerful presumption. Many a historian and literary critic used to assume that "Shakespeare was an Elizabethan, so he must have only Elizabethan thoughts," forgetting that he is the one "Elizabethan" who towers above all others by writing works none of them did. Thus E. M. W. Tillyard read Ulysses' grandiloquent speech on order and degree (based on Hooker) in Troilus and Cressida and assumed that Shakespeare agreed, even though Ulysses, through this very speech, rules—that is, usurps—his own superior by order and degree, King Agamemnon.
These days the arguments run lower: Shakespeare was male with only male thoughts, white with only white thoughts, and, of course, dead with only dead thoughts. Some today seem more respectful, but only by imagining Shakespeare a victim of pervasive Elizabethan repression. All this is worse, to be sure, than the claim we know him a Catholic, but it is based on the same presumption: I know who he is, so I know what he thinks; and with the same result: no need to study.
Shakespeare Hidden
Yet the instance of Shakespeare seems singularly unfitted to this presumption, for two reasons: the character of the life and the character of the works. No life would seem to invite less speculation. The records concern marriages, births and deaths, property, and one trial. The few reports and testimonies that reach us speak of no duels, no quarrels, no scandals; his company was a wonder of amity; and in that one trial he testified at, he shows up as a maker of a good match, such as he arranges in his comedies. There are only six signed papers, and no letters. In all these, there is no thought. The Sonnets are, it is true, intimate, but shadowy; they will forever frustrate the itch to get "the real story." Shakespeare's narrative poems do tell stories, but none is the story of Shakespeare.
Moreover, there are none but poetic works; the thoughts such as Milton, Shelley, and Yeats left us outside their poetic works is not there. Shakespeare wrote no Of Christian Doctrine, no Necessity of Atheism, and no A Vision. (And even if he had written all three, the warning of D. H. Lawrence, "Trust the tale, not the teller," would need to be heeded.) In no work does Shakespeare tell us what he thinks.
Though it would be hard to find a greater contrast between the life and the works, the one dull as a puddle and the other grand and multitudinous as the ocean, yet, in both life and works, Shakespeare seems hidden—and more even in the works, for they are so perfectly dramatic, with the speeches so marvelously fitted to each character, that their author is as invisible as water in water.
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