“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,”