William Shakespeare
From Philosopedia
Shakespeare, William (April 1564 – 23 April 1616)
The greatest playwright and author in the English language - if indeed he wrote all the works ascribed to him Shakespeare was the person who pointed out that “Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.”
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The Humanities-centered Humanist
Humanities-centered humanists empathize with the man born where a Roman road (strata via) crossed an afon (Welsh for the river Avon) near a ford: Stratford-on-Avon. As pointed out by Princeton’s Thomas Marc Parrott, town records show that John, his father, a glover, had been fined twelve pence for failing to remove a dirt heap in front of his house. But the father’s fortunes rose in 1552 when he married Mary Arden, daughter of his father’s landlord. Now the father became the town’s first ale-taster (who supervised the price and quality of ale as well as bread). He continued advancing, becoming a town councilor, chamberlain (keeper of borough accounts), alderman, and in 1568 the bailiff or presiding officer of the Corporation. In such a capacity he granted licenses starting in 1568 to traveling companies of players, leading one to envision that he might have taken the four-year-old William to his first stage play in some guild hall, possibly utilizing complimentary tickets. By 1578, in a turn of fortune, John’s finances were such that he was unable to pay the weekly sum of four-pence for the relief of the poor, and by 1586 he was deposed from his office as alderman because of continued absences from meetings. In 1592, John was reported a “recusant,” one who failed to attend the parish church for fear of being arrested for debt, and one can imagine the effect this had on his family. Mary, William’s mother, had come from a family whose landed gentry included a Robert Arden, who in 1438 had been sheriff of the county; and his descendant, Edward Arden, also once high sheriff, who was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. William’s mother, in the opinion of Princeton’s Thomas Marc Parrott, likely adhered in secret to her father’s faith.
William was baptized as Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere on Wednesday, April 16th, 1564. The oldest surviving child, he studied in a guild school that taught subjects entirely in Latin, including Aesop’s Fables, Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Seneca, and the Geneva version of the Bible. In what must have embarrassed the family, the son William at age nineteen informed his parents of his need for a speedy marriage to Anne Hathaway, eight years his elder. On November 28th, 1582, friends filed a bond with the Bishop of Worcester, in whose diocese the town of Stratford lay, in order that the couple could marry without the customary delay of a triple announcing of the banns in church. For any such delay would have carried them into the Advent season and by the old church law marriage was forbidden from Advent Sunday until about the middle of January (apparently so as not to distract from the celebration by Christians of Jesus’s alleged birthday). The Bishop granted the license, and Anne’s child Susanna was baptized May 26th, 1583, only six or so months after the revelation. John took no part in the marriage and possibly did not approve of his son’s marrying a poor girl eight years the boy’s elder, but Susanna arrived soon after the marriage ceremony. Two years later Anne presented William with twins, Hamnet and Judith. Thereupon, and perhaps because his wife had “gotten religion” on account of her “sin” that resulted in daughter Susanna, William left the family to make his name and fortune in the evil theatre world of the evil city of London, which Puritans had preached so much against and which obviously attracted the twenty-something writer.
The Critic Harold Bloom has declared in The Anatomy of Influence (2011) that Shakespeare's greatest creations are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, and Cleopatra and that The Tempest and The Winter's Tale are tragicomedies and not romances and that Titus Andronicus parodies the tragedies of his defeated rival Marlowe.
Religion, Philosophy?
Although his references to religion were many and varied, following are a few:
- • In religion, what damned error but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness with fair ornament? – The Merchant of Venice
- • Thrust your head into the public street, to gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces. – The Merchant of Venice
- • Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian. – Twelfth Night
- • His worst fault is, he’s given to prayer; he is something peevish that way. – The Merry Wives of Windsor
- • Scurvy jack-dog priest! By gar, me vill cut his ears. – The Merry Wives of Windsor
- • Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise. – Troilus and Cressida
- • Thou art a proud traitor, priest . . . gleaning all of the land’s wealth into one, into your own hands, cardinal, by extortion. . . . I’ll startle you worse than the sacring bell, when the brown wench lay kissing in your arms, lord cardinal. – King Henry VIII
- • We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. – The Tempest
- • I tell thee, churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling. – Hamlet
George Santayana in The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare indicates that Shakespeare was not into supernaturalism. The German critic Georg Gervinus declared that Shakespeare “wholly discarded from his works . . . that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion.” He also wrote that “Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art. . . . From Bacon’s example it seems clear that Shakespeare left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds.”
John M. Robertson commented, “While there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays, in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure, the Duke, counseling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.”
Prof. J. R. Green in the 19th century wrote, “Often [Shakespeare's] questionings turned to the riddle of life and death, and he leaves it a riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions around him.” But, because of his being the best known of all writers in English, and never unequivocally having gone on record concerning his philosophic outlook, Shakespeare has been claimed by believers and non-believers alike.
Atheism?
His 154 sonnets are cryptic in their description of his relations with a rival poet, a dark woman, and a handsome man. No one is certain as to who these three, if they were real, actually were. A. L. Rowse, himself a homosexual, claimed Shakespeare had no male lover, that he was “a strongly sexed heterosexual” and a man “more than a little interested in women—for an Englishman.” Rowse claimed the Dark Lady was Emilia Bassano Lanier, the daughter of an Italian court musician. (See entry for Shakespeare's Sonnets.) Many point to atheistic overtones in “The Tempest”:
- Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
- As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
- Are melted into air, into thin air;
- And, like the baseless fabric of this vision
- The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
- The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
- Yea, all which is inherent, shall dissolve,
- And, like this insubstantial pageant folded,
- Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff
- As dreams are made of, and our little life
- Is rounded with a sleep.
Later Views
Shakespeare’s successes are internationally known, but not so well-known is that he stayed away from his family in Stratford until his final years, returning as likely the wealthiest man in town. According to Parrott, he must have been disturbed by the slander that was circulated about his daughter Susanna, and still more by the imprudent marriage of Judith who, in 1616, married Thomas Quiney in February, the “closed season,” without a special license, resulting in their excommunication.
Joseph McCabe notes that Shakespeare’s work is entirely objective, “his pagan characters using pagan language, his Christian characters Christian, and we have no expression of personal opinion or evidence of contemporaries” about his personal beliefs. “It is therefore impossible to reach a definite conclusion. We may say with the historian Green that there is no depth in ‘the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work’ and that in the serious and more or less didactic plays of his last phase he does not apply to the problems of life ‘the common theological solutions’; in other words he gives us the impression of being a simple humanist in his maturity. We can say only that the skeptical interpretation seems more probable than the Christian.”
His Will
In 1616 William had called for his lawyer, Francis Collins, to make certain changes in his will. The opening paragraph of his will included the following: “I commend my soul unto the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting,” words typical of the time and likely were those of his lawyer. In fact, George Bernard Shaw researched the material and concluded, “Shakespeare had no conscious religion.” Shakespeare arranged for a marriage portion for Judith, canceled his gift of plate (silver) to her in favor of his little grandchild, Elizabeth (who had become his darling in his last days); left memorial rings to Burbage, Heminges, and Condell; left little or nothing to the just-excommunicated Judith; and left his “second best bed” to his wife, apparently a recognition that their hasty wedding had not resulted in a congenial and happy marriage. He left nothing to any church. The next month, according to the Vicar of Stratford, “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”
When Virginia Woolf visited Shakespeare’s grave at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1934, she noted in A Writer’s Diary (1934) her feelings about how “down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination.”
In Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human (1998), Harold Bloom concluded that Shakespeare’s religious sentiments will never be known, because “Shakespeare maintained his usual ambiguity in this dangerous area.” He also noted that Hamlet is neither a Protestant nor a Catholic work: “It seems to me indeed neither Christian nor non-Christian, since Hamlet’s skepticism does not merely exceed its possible origin in Montaigne but passes into something rich and strong in Act V, something for which we have no name.”
Inasmuch as his only son had died in childhood, and Susanna’s only child, Elizabeth, died childless in 1670, and the three sons of Judith had died long before, Shakespeare’s descendants were soon extinct. He achieved his immortality as have all productive humanists: by living on in his works.
(See George Santayana’s “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare; and Les Reid’s “Shakespeare and the Wars of Religion,” New Humanist, December 1995, in which he considers the possibility that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Also, see entry for A. L. Rowse. Not a few rationalists wish that would replace Christianity Bardolatry.)
{CB; CE; FUK; GL; JMR; JMRH; TRI; TYD}
