Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
• Published by: PublicAffairs June 26, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1586483870
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1586483876
• Book Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Weighs: 13.6 ounces

From Publishers Weekly
The wife of a British diplomat who was posted to Moscow during the Cold War, Asquith first started to suspect that Shakespeare's plays possessed an unexamined political and religious subtext while watching a seemingly innocuous performance in a Soviet theater and realizing that it was embedded with secret meanings and double entendres. In a tome both literary and dense, though thankfully not prohibitively so, Asquith shines an extraordinary light on the symbolism and possible intentions of Shakespeare's work. The Catholic playwright, Asquith contends, wrote to outsmart the "Queen's men," who caught up to him only after he had written dozens of plays reflecting the mournful frustration of Catholics oppressed by Elizabethan Protestantism. Asquith uses Shakesepeare's plays as prisms through which to observe the awesome upheaval of the times. A second look at Julius Caesar reveals the Roman conspirators to be Protestant instigators, and Troilus and Cressida is, according to the author, a commentary on the state of Catholic opposition to the Reformation. Described as "an upstart Crow" by Robert Greene-playwright for the rival theater company Queen's Men, which Asquith characterizes as a Protestant propaganda machine-Shakespeare found protection in the patronage of lady Magdalen Montague, a Catholic, and even worked her into a number of his plays, including A Winter's Tale, Romeo and Juliet and Comedy of Errors. Though occasionally didactic, Asquith's multifaceted examination reveals as much about the history of 17th-century England as it does about the playwright and his plays, and should intrigue admirers of both.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Few masterpieces contain as many chestnuts as Hamlet. Take this one: "The play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King." With these words, Prince Hamlet welcomes a theatrical troupe whose performance will unmask adultery and regicide in the Danish court.

Aphorisms wither faster than cut flowers, but sometimes old saws reveal new truths. Long before these lines became shopworn, they hinted at Shakespeare's modus operandi: In Shadowplay, Clare Asquith argues that the bard was using the theater of his day just as Hamlet did -- to send dangerous, skillfully encoded messages to his audience and his monarch. Hence, she writes, "it took not only intellectual brilliance but exceptional courage and constancy" to create and perform the greatest plays ever written.

Asquith is surfing an intriguing new wave of research: Shakespeare, it goes, was a closet Catholic at a time when the Church was banned. And far from presiding over the Golden Age, Queen Elizabeth I was running a police state, marked by raids, seizures, imprisonment and grisly executions, where informants snitched on private citizens. The court of her successor, James I, was worse.

Shakespeare's plays, Asquith suggests, encouraged patience and perseverance among the beleaguered Catholics and urged England's rulers to curtail the frequent crackdowns and persecutions.

What we do know: Shakespeare's Stratford was a center of religious resistance to the "new religion"; his father left a written testament of his enduring Catholic faith; Shakespeare's daughter, Susannah, was a "recusant," charged with refusing to attend Protestant services. The Ardens, Shakespeare's mother's family, were staunch Catholics whose chieftain, Edward Arden, was executed for his beliefs in 1583 by the usual method (he was dragged on a hurdle behind horses, then hanged, cut down alive, disemboweled and castrated before his heart was cut out).

Shakespeare was famously private about his life and habits -- as were many Catholics anxious to conceal their recusancy and attendance at illegal masses. But does that suggest he was Catholic? Asquith points out that most Elizabethans were, up until the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The line was a murky Neverland -- some "Catholics" hid priests, risking their lives; others complied publicly, merely remaining "Catholic" at heart. Catholic playwrights took huge chances, dropping hints and references in their scripts. Asquith isn't the first to fish in these waters, of course. Scholars have been poring over Shakespeare's plays for decades, trying to find clues about his attitude towards his times.

But Asquith is no nitpicking professor. She's not afraid to wing it. By taking unscholarly chances, she may have unlocked a door. We may have been looking at the plays with a microscope, hunting for political comment in the odd line or two, when what we really needed was a wide-angle lens.

For example, in "King Lear," two sisters, motivated by material gain, falsely promise that they will give all their love to their father. Their honest sister is exiled for saying she must divide her love for her father with the obedience she will owe her husband. Significantly, religious dissidents at that time were refusing to pledge fealty to King James over their faith and the pope. Similarly, when Elizabethan audiences watched Laertes protest the brief obsequies given his sister Ophelia, they knew that Catholics were furtively burying their loved ones with the old rites, while publicly holding fake burials with the "maimed rites." Violent quarrels sometimes erupted in churches, and zealous Protestants exhumed bodies in the night.

That said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and some of Asquith's "markers" are farfetched. It's possible, as she suggests, that Shakespeare's tall, fair heroines represent the Catholic ideals, and the short, swarthy ones represent Protestant principles. But it's even more likely that Shakespeare really did have a dark mistress who influenced his poems and plays. And likely, too, that he was acknowledging contemporary fashions and pandering to a fair, redheaded (and notoriously vain) queen. Such sweeping conjectures detract from the merits of Shadowplay.

Asquith claims that Shakespeare did not retire quietly to Stratford in 1610 -- he was silenced. She links his sudden disappearance with the shockwaves created by the assassination of Henry IV of France. That king was a champion of tolerance who was murdered by a mad friar. Within a few years, all the major playwrights of the time had quit the theater, with the noteworthy exception of Ben Jonson, who publicly renounced Catholicism in 1610. They drifted back in the 1620s, but by that time, Shakespeare was dead -- and England was irrevocably Protestant.

Asquith smashes the familiar icon of Shakespeare as a determined conformist who brilliantly skated the political thin ice that cracked under his less skillful countrymen. Her Shakespeare is darker and more complex -- a tormented dissident who died in defeat. Asquith is far from alone in her conjectures. The portrait that is emerging shows that Shakespeare was a hero as awesome as any he created.

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (Hardcover) John Guy, Fellow of History at Clare College, Cambridge, and winner of the Whitebread Prize, has written that if even half of the insights in this wonderful book are true, it is the most visceral, challenging, and compelling work on Shakespeare's place in history in twenty years. I agree with this perpective: Clare Asquith's insights are profound, and this book has the potentially to fundamentally change how we view Shakespeare and the plays, in a way that only adds to their majesty. "Shadowplay" is a very strong work in an area that is only beginning to gain academic attention--namely, the heretofore hidden or suppressed history of a persecuted minority during one of the more fascinating and influential periods in English (and European) history. Historians and literary scholars have only recently focused on this topic, their early work is highly compelling, and it bears much future promise. As the above suggests, I admire this book very much, and am hoping that it will gain greater attenion in the mainstream media and in academia. It's argument is original and compelling; it also beautifully and succinctly written, often quite moving in its insights, and an overall pleasure to read. Highly recommended to anyone that is interested in Shakespeare, the culture of the English Renaissance, and England under Elizabeth I and James I, it deserves the starred reviews it has received so far as well as the endorsements from well-regarded, thoughtful scholars (see above in summary of reviews to date provided by Amazon). Oneon the previous review--even a superficial reading on Asquith's book makes it clear that the author knows. very well, that Elizabeth and James' church is not Puritan, but is engaged in the decades-long process of hammering out what would become the "Anglican solution" or "the middle way" between Catholicism and Calivinism/Puritanism. According to the book's hypothesis, Shakespeare's very strong motivation throughout his plays is to bring to his audience's (and the Crown's) attention the importance of traditional English Chrisitanity--i.e., the Roman Catholic faith and culture that had produced the English Renaissance and the humanism of Thomas More, and which carried within its mores a proto-Reformation that anticipated some of the demands of the Protestant refomers as well as the Roman Catholic reforms implemented at the Council of Trent. Over time, this motivation is coupled with a plea to Elizabeth and James to modify the regime's suppresion of this traditional Catholicism and allow for the toleration of the different, competing forms of Christianity--Catholicism, Calvinism, and emerging Anglicanism. This toleration, Shakespeare believes, will enable the traditional Catholicism to which he is so devoted to continue to flower (rather than to wilt under the suppression of what today would be called a police state and to eventually be forgotten or scorned). Asquith knows the political, social, and literary history of the era quite well, her reading of the plays is detailed and nuanced, and her argument comprehensive and often quite subtle. I think it is important to take these into account in assessing the book's strengths and weaknesses. Bottom line: one of the best books I have read in a very long-time, and one that adds immeasurably to my appreciation of William Shakespeare and my enjoyment of his plays and poetry.