THE BRIDES OF CHRIST.
I.
ST. DOROTHEA.
The little martyr-maid of Cæsarea—
I do not a more lovely legend know.
Said young Theophilus, mocking: “Dost thou go
To join thy Spouse? If more than fond idea,
Send me, I pray thee, pretty Dorothea,
Of flowers and fruits that in his garden grow!”
The maiden meekly bowed her head; and so
She passed to death along the Roman Via.
A blooming boy, with hair like odorous flame,
Out-dazed the sword that slew her; the next morn
A blooming boy to young Theophilus came,
With three fresh roses and three apples: scorn
Melted in bliss. By crown and palm! we claim
To guess that fragrance, and are less forlorn!
II.
ST. CECILIA.
Two visions of divine Cecilia,
Born of Italian art, possess my mind.
One in the marble, at her tomb enshrined,
Reveals her as in catacomb she lay.
The budding maiden in her chaste array—
Ah! closely let that awful necklace bind
Clipt flower to stem!—to that cold sleep declined,
Was in warm marriage-bed a bud alway.
Her heart’s dear love starved for a Mystic Spouse;
She was not chary of sweet music’s gift
I see the listening rapture of her brows:
I hear her organ yearn, exult, and lift
Humanity to God! The heavens arouse,
And storms and seraphs o’er the white keys drift.
III.
ST. AGNES.
I was God’s maid, less woman than a child;
And yet they threw me in the common stews
Naked as I was born, for men to use.
The dear Lord saved his vessel, though reviled,
From outrage of a look: the Mother smiled—
Over my hot shame all my hair shook loose;
And, lo! it swept my feet in lengths profuse,
A bower of blinding awe to ruffians wild!
My life’s green branch they lopped with cruel sword;
But He hath kissed my hurts, and they are well;
And, walking in the meads of asphodel,
I kiss the scarred feet of my gracious Lord:
I lead his lambkins by my lily bell,
Where the pomegranates shade the softest sward.
SHAKSPERE, FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW.[[71]]
This elegantly-printed volume, published in England, though by an American author, has for its subject four distinct lines of inquiry; two of these—the validity of a theory which originated in this country a few years ago, that Bacon, Lord Verulam, really wrote the plays known as Shakspere’s; and, secondly, the extent of Shakspere’s legal knowledge—though carried through the work, are subordinate to the other two—the anti-democratic tone of the dramatist and the fact that he was a Catholic. These are the real issues of the book. Mr. Wilkes holds that Shakspere should not exert the influence in this country that he does in England, and he arraigns him at the bar of American public opinion to answer the indictment that he is always a strenuous upholder of royal authority, an advocate of the privileges of the nobility, regarding them as far removed above the ignobile vulgus, for whom on all occasions the poet manifests the utmost contempt. That a work teeming with constant lessons of this character is no fit guide for Americans he makes the real argument of his book. The second count is apparently intended to be no less damaging. Shakspere was a Catholic, and as such should exercise no influence on a Protestant community. His influence in England for three hundred years has not apparently won that country back to Catholicity, and the United States are probably as safe. Still, it may serve for a new agitation to get up a cry: “No Shakspere in the public schools!”
That Mr. Wilkes considers it a danger is seen by the fact that he uses toward Catholics every vile nickname drawn from the slums by religious hate to degrade us in the eyes of our fellow-men. Yet surely a Shaksperean scholar should not need reminding that to rob one of his good name is worse than stealing his purse, oft-times as bad as taking his life. Not only this, but he more than once represents the Catholic Church as actuated by a hatred of intense fury against the Jews, as an earnest upholder of the unlawful claims of aristocracy, as an enemy of popular rights, and as an excuser of perjury. While thus under a strong anti-Catholic bias or prejudice—stronger even than he at all conceives—he has attempted to understand Catholic terms and usages, and to enter into that world which to Protestants seems so strange and inconceivable—the world of Catholic thought.
The question as to the religious convictions of Shakspere is not a new one. No Catholic has ever read the great dramatist without feeling that he was strangely lacking in the usual anti-Catholic element, even if he did not impress him as often Catholic in thought.
Catholic writers in English periodicals, such as the Rambler and others, had already claimed Shakspere as a Catholic. All evidence, extrinsic and intrinsic, seems to sustain the position. His family belonged to the gentry on the father’s and mother’s side, and on both sides had adhered to Catholicity after the change of religion in England. The will of his maternal grandfather, Robert Arden, who died in 1556, is distinctly Catholic: “I bequeath my soul to Almighty God, and to our Blessed Lady St. Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven.” Of his father there is still extant a Testament of the Soul—not, as Mr. Wilkes supposes, a form drawn up by some chaplain of the family, but that Testamentum Animæ Christianæ which, in Latin and the vernacular, has for centuries been found in Catholic devotional manuals, and the copying of which, as a kind of formal act, has been maintained in many families—certainly was in the family of the present writer down to the nineteenth century. Shakspere’s father, too, was fined for non-attendance at the established church. So far as the families of his parents were concerned, he was evidently Catholic, and must in childhood have been familiar with the thoughts and language of English Catholics. How far in mature age he retained the impressions of youth, or how faithful he may have been to the teachings of his religion, we have no means of judging. The lightness with which moral obligations lay on him, his career as a wild but gifted man, give little ground for supposing him to have practised the religion he may still have professed.
In his dramas Shakspere constantly uses Catholic terms, speaks of Catholic clergy, religious of both sexes, rites and ceremonies with respect, and in many cases turns his ridicule upon the new order of clergy in England. The Shaksperes and Ardens had both held office under the Tudor kings, and the dramatist shows the utmost zeal for royal power as against the Pope. To a Catholic, now, this gives his position at once. His life was not a regular one; and he could scarcely, in those days of persecution, have been a firm, consistent, practical Catholic, although he clung to the faith, never abjured it, and had no liking for any of the new forms. His Bible reading was in the Protestant versions of the day, not in the Rheims and Douay, of which no influence has ever been detected in his plays. That he died a good Catholic needs proof; but Mr. Wilkes’ ideas of the meaning of the term are vague, since he tells us that Henry VIII. died a good Catholic.
The fact that Shakspere makes his characters—most of whom are Catholics in time or country—speak as Catholics is really no proof of his own Catholicity, any more than Longfellow’s almost constant correctness in his use of Catholic terms and familiarity with Catholic thought is proof that he is a Catholic. The fact is, we admit, suspicious; for during centuries Protestant writers seem to have made it a point to display the most intense ignorance of Catholic terms, usages, rites, and ceremonies, and equally a point to insist on talking about what they vaunt their ignorance of. But, going back to Shakspere’s time, we must bear in mind that the new religion had not yet taken any hold on the people at large; that the only religious terms and expressions that conveyed any definite ideas to their minds were those of the old faith sanctioned by the usage of centuries, and that the terms introduced by the various classes of reformers were diverse, new, strange, and, to the people, a mere ridiculous jargon. The coinage of a new religious vocabulary took time and skill. It was no easy task to shape Bible translation so as to avoid old ideas and thoughts. This new jargon rose to be a language when the King James Bible was imposed on the people after the Restoration. Though long vaunted as a well of English undefiled, philologists now admit that it is the language of no period of English history, of no district of English soil; it was a hash made to meet the pressing want, with obsolete words, terms drawn from every county of England, and new-coined expressions, all forced into the service so as to supply the English people with a new vocabulary of religious thought.
To convey religious ideas in Shakspere’s time, the readiest words were those familiar to the people. The dramatist employs them with no regard to the country or time. The pagan Hamlet refers to the Blessed Sacrament, Extreme Unction, the Mass, and Office for the Dead; they talk of confession and beads in the Comedy of Errors; of indulgences in the Tempest, and even in Troilus and Cressida; of fasting days in Pericles and Coriolanus; and christening is spoken of in Titus Andronicus. The anachronisms were apparently not noticed in his time, nor taken into account.
The system had not been adopted of entirely ignoring Catholic terms; there were no others, and Shakspere used what he had. One word seems to be avoided. The Mass is introduced only like Moore’s “neat little Testament, just kept to swear by.” It occurs only in the form of an oath, except in one instance, to which Mr. Wilkes devotes a chapter. Juliet, going to her confessor, asks:
“Are you at leisure, holy father, now,
Or shall I come to you at evening Mass?”
Mr. Wilkes goes into a lengthened argument to show that it was the custom at that time in England to celebrate Mass at night. He says: “I have found many illustrations from Catholic reviews and other reliable authorities of the practices of the hedge-priests, as they were called, in times of Catholic persecution, whose business it was to go in the darkness of the evening to the houses of the faithful to celebrate a nocturnal Mass.” We should be much pleased to see any such authorities. He cites only an article in the Manhattan Monthly last year, where a writer speaks of priests in Ireland “who often at dead of night fled to the mountain cave, the wooded glen, and wild rath to celebrate Mass for the faithful”; but travelling by night is one thing, and saying Mass at night is another. Again, there were no priests in England answering to the Irish hedge-priests. The priests in England found shelter in the houses of Catholic gentry; they had not a mass of poor and oppressed faithful among whom they lived. But neither in Ireland nor in England is there a single example that the writer has ever found of a Mass said in what may be called the evening—that is, between sunset and midnight—much less of its being so frequent an occurrence as to make Shakspere refer to evening Mass as an ordinary matter. Dodd’s History of the Church, Challoner’s Missionary Priests, the works of Father Parsons, Campion, and other Catholic writers of the time, never allude to any single case where such a Mass was said. Nor is there in any liturgical work reference to any such custom ever having obtained in England.
Mr. Wilkes seems to feel that the theory is not very solid. He next refers to the custom in some parts of saying a Low Mass immediately after the Sunday High Mass. “Shakspere may have considered the last or one o’clock Mass an evening Mass.” The play itself makes this untenable. It was late in the afternoon when Juliet went to the friar. When she comes back the nurse says:
“See where she comes from shrift with merry look”—
not half as charmingly as Longfellow describes Evangeline as most beautiful
“When, after confession,
Homeward serenely she walks with God’s benediction upon her.”
Then, a few lines lower down, Lady Capulet, in the same scene, says:
“’Tis now near night.”
This fixes the time too clearly to allow that any reference is made to a Mass about mid-day. “Evening Mass” is simply nonsense; but the phrase has charmed later writers, and several poets introduce the expression, just as poets and prose writers have all copied the Protestant Bible misprint, “Strain at a gnat,” instead of “Strain out a gnat.”
But the word Mass here is against all Catholic custom and reason. Juliet wishes to go to confession. She politely asks her confessor whether he is at leisure or whether she shall come again at a later hour. Would any one, under the same circumstances, propose to come to confession to the priest when he was saying Mass? It would be just the time when he could not possibly hear confessions. If he expected to say Mass soon, he would hear her then, and neither he nor she would think of putting it off till he had begun his Mass. Shakspere critics have boggled and blundered over this without seeing this incongruity, which to a Catholic is as patent as the day. What, then, does it mean? Juliet can ask only whether he will hear her then or whether she shall come later. Now, if we consider Shakspere to have written:
“Are you at leisure, holy father, now,
Or shall I come to you as evening wanes?”
the whole thing is as natural, consistent, and usual to Catholic ideas as can be. Then there is no such absurdity as evening Mass, or going to confession to a priest who is saying Mass. The dense ignorance of later times on every Catholic matter will easily account for the neglect to correct the palpable error in the actual text.
The fact that, while Shakspere speaks of religion as the monastic state, religious, monks, nuns, convents, monasteries, beads, penance, month’s mind, dirge, requiem, purgatory, indulgences, relics, shrines, the housel (Eucharist), christening or baptism, aneling (anointing), the cross, altar, holy-water, he nowhere in any of his plays speaks of the Mass (except in the oath “By the Mass”), is a strong argument against its use here. Convents and monasteries were abolished; relics and shrines were gone; no dirges or requiems resounded in the old church walls; allusions to them were simply allusions to something deemed past and gone; but there were nearly a thousand Mass-priests in England—men who carried their lives in their hands, over whom the severest edicts of the law were hanging like the sword of Damocles. To talk of the Mass as a service with respect was verging on high treason. Having avoided it everywhere else, he would scarcely introduce it here absurdly—no less absurdly to him than to us.
At that time, though the government was anti-Catholic, the state church was a mere matter of office. There was little zeal in its members—little more than conformity to law. The Puritans were active and zealous in spreading their doctrines; but the people were to a great extent still Catholic, and, with many nobles and gentlemen as leaders, and a greater number of priests than during the next two centuries, formed a power which was finally crushed by the Civil War. With this body Shakspere sympathized. He was not of the stuff to make a martyr. Ben Jonson and Massinger were, we know, Catholics, but not a single act of Shakspere’s is recorded that stamps him as a Catholic. He was not fined as a recusant, had no intercourse with known Catholics, in all arrests under the penal laws there is no allusion to him, even as using his undoubted influence with the great to shield some poor victim. With the mass of the people, at court and not at court, he ridiculed the new Gospellers, as we do Millerites or any other oddities. Against royal supremacy or the religion established by law, the Common Prayer, or the bishops who had been intruded into the old Catholic sees, Shakspere says nothing. His ridicule is never launched at them. His wit is turned, as was that of the court circle, at the Puritan element. The state church was respectable, but lacked earnestness, piety, and zeal: it was simply a state affair. Those whose minds and imaginations tended to effusive piety found themselves repulsed. Gradually they camped apart and formed new organizations. In Shakspere’s time the government and the government church laughed at them, when they should have used them to build up the Church of England. Just so in the following century they repulsed Wesley. Shakspere takes not a Catholic but the court-prelatic side; and there were no prophets on that side to see that James’ son was to die on the block and the Church of England be abolished by these very Puritans. That he had any direct idea of attacking Protestantism as a system, or making his dramas—with their coarse and often impure speech, such as then found favor with Elizabeth and her court—an arm against the Reformation, is absurd, and Mr. Wilkes, in going through play after play to note every praise of convents or religious practices as done with a direct view to elevate the Catholic Church, is extravagant. We have but to remember that Protestantism had then no institutions, no religious rites or practices, nothing absolutely for a poet or dramatist to employ as illustrations. Protestant poets and artists feel the poverty to this day, and in despair turn from cold, set formalism to Catholic themes, where poetry finds so many a subject.
Our American critic has endeavored to follow out Catholic thoughts, but not always successfully. Thus, in Richard III. Elizabeth addressing her murdered children:
“If yet your gentle souls fly in the air,”
and Buckingham:
“If that your moody discontented souls
Do through the clouds behold this present hour,”
are gravely put down as evidences of Shakspere’s recognition of the doctrine of purgatory, as though every believer in ghosts must be a believer in purgatory. There are some comical remarks about Shakspere’s familiarity with “the intricacies of the Roman Catholic faith,” because in Henry VI. we find:
“Although by sight his sin be multiplied,”
when surely the Scriptural injunction to pluck out an eye that leads one to sin might explain it without his getting tangled in intricacies. His knowledge of the marriage service also seems peculiar; the rituals we know are hardly the origin of Shakspere’s marriage form.
Mr. Wilkes is evidently led away by his theory in his forced Catholic interpretation of many passages of the dramatist; and his desire to show that the whole series of dramas was a device of the Catholic Church to attack Protestantism in England induces him to strain much to support his view, and often to jump at unwarranted conclusions, as in making Hartley, in the strange Girachy case, to have been a priest. A man might be hanged as a Catholic priest—as Ury was a century ago within sight of the spot where Mr. Wilkes’ office now stands—and yet not have been even a Catholic. There is no Catholic record of priest or layman suffering in connection with this affair.
Hence, while we admit Mr. Wilkes’ diligence and ability in studying Shakspere, we must regret that his judgment, like that of too many, has been warped by the old anti-Catholic feeling, to the extent of giving the plays a character which neither friend nor foe of Catholicity at the time dreamed of ascribing to them.
In treating the question of Shakspere’s legal knowledge, he is free from bias, and hence easily perceives and often exposes the exaggeration which induces learned men of the law to interpret much that any attendant at courts, whether as witness or juror, might easily acquire as proof of serious legal study. The length to which the legal argument has been pushed has led to similar claims by other professions; but a young man of such Catholic stock as Shakspere undoubtedly was could scarcely have attempted to obtain admission to the bar in those days.
Certainly, as Mr. Wilkes well maintains, the amount of legal knowledge and the use of legal terms manifested in the plays are not of the character that we should expect from one who had held such eminent legal and judicial positions as Lord Bacon. Nor is this, as he shows, the only difficulty. The style of the dramas and that of Bacon’s acknowledged writings are utterly different; the conception of thoughts and their clothing in language are both distinct. The ear attuned to Shakspere finds in Bacon a measure, an adaptation of words, a symmetry of his own, utterly at variance with the dramatist. Wilkes’ euphonic test has great weight; and he well and aptly cites Bacon to show that the chancellor made style a test of disputed authorship. If the Baconian theory is but “a bubble which has never floated among the public with any amount of success,” it has doubtless found some advocates, and Mr. Wilkes has strengthened the arguments against it.
His argument against Shakspere as one who worships a lord and despises the middle and lower classes has but the one fault: that it takes our modern American theories as the test—our theories, and not our practice; for after all personal liberty has, in a certain sense, steadily declined in America during the last century, and many of the rights possessed by individuals in Shakspere’s time, and enjoyed by our ancestors down to the Revolution, have been swept away in the name of liberty, while general and local taxation has reached a point that often amounts practically to confiscation of all revenue, and sometimes of the whole estate. In point of fact, the lower classes among us are more oppressed in person and property by official power, and less able to obtain legal redress, than they were in England in Shakspere’s time. The distinction of rank was then as absolute almost as that of the Hindoo castes, and the contemptuous style of the day in which the aristocratic portion treated their inferiors was caught up too readily by Shakspere. Mr. Wilkes develops this element steadily through the work, and makes it, as we have seen, the basis of one of his heaviest charges against the dramatist. He treats the point skilfully, and the subject affords a fine scope for discussion. For our own part, we think that he carries his theory too far, and that Shakspere may find an advocate who will relieve him from much of the obloquy and secure his claim to respect in America.
Shakspere literature is now a field so vast, and has won contributions from so many able minds and eloquent pens, that it requires some courage to produce a new work on the topic at large; yet Mr. Wilkes has certainly produced a volume that will take a prominent place among the Shaksperiana. It gives utterance to many new views; the whole treatment, being thoroughly American, is fresh and free from much of the conventional bias that is almost inevitable in England; while solid German learning, by its very seriousness and profundity, seems often to miss the point and finesse of the dramatist.
The Catholic part is so prominent that we could not but treat it plainly and frankly, addressing as we do more exclusively a circle of Catholic readers. We do so with no wish to be merely censorious, and with our recognition of the author’s evidently careful study and desire to treat the question fairly.
“He presents the volume,” he avows, “rather as a series of inquiries than as dogmatic doctrine, and strives,” he says, “to support them only by such an amount of controversy as is legitimately due from one who invites the public to a new discussion.”