Heroes of the Catholic Reformation. Joseph Pearce
hero, and the saint, Thomas More, becomes the villain. “Through Cromwell,” writes Thomas More scholar William Fahey, “we hear Mantel’s own frustration with the enduring nature of the truth and the haggard, but consistent, account of Catholic history.” According to Fahey, Mantel’s revisionist distortion of history is an “attempt at clouding any clear memory of a Catholic Britain and a Catholic sensibility towards life.”11
Having highlighted what might be called the good, the not so good, and the downright ugly in recent dramatic interpretations of the life and legacy of Thomas More, we can hardly pass over the manner in which More has inspired the imagination of the greatest playwright of them all. The story of Shakespeare’s involvement in the play Sir Thomas More has all the ingredients of a first-rate mystery story that warrants our attention. A pro-Catholic play written in very anti-Catholic times, it illustrates the powerful presence of Sir Thomas More in England’s cultural, religious, and political consciousness more than sixty years after his martyrdom and offers valuable evidence for Shakespeare’s Catholic sympathies.
Before such evidence is examined, we should consider the evidence of Shakespeare’s admiration for More discernible in a pun on More’s name in the Poet’s Sonnet 23:
As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s right,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might:
O let my books be then the eloquence,
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that love which more hath more expressed.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
Clearly the twelfth line of the sonnet comes alive with allegorical significance when the middle or final “more” is capitalized: More than that love which More hath more expressed, or, alternatively, More than that love which more hath More expressed. Once the pun is accepted, the sonnet springs to life metaphysically and metaphorically, contrasting Shakespeare’s own “unperfect” love, weakened by “fear” and “rage,” with the holy love “which [M]ore hath more expressed.” There is also a sublime allusion to the Mass as “The perfect ceremony of love’s right,” reinforced by the pun on “right/rite,” and illustrating a deep theological understanding of the Mass as the “perfect ceremony” which re-presents Christ’s death for sinners as “love’s right” and “love’s rite.” Unlocking this beguiling sonnet still further, we see that the Poet laments that he is not present at this “perfect ceremony” as often as he should be because of “fear of trust,” perhaps a reference to the spies who were present at these secret Masses intent on reporting the names of “papists” and on betraying the priests to the authorities. Since he does not have the heroic self-sacrificial love, even unto death, of Thomas More, the Poet desires that his “books” be his “eloquence,” the “dumb presagers of my speaking breast.” The final two lines are surely addressed to both the Poet himself and to his Reader, beseeching the latter to “learn to read” in his plays what the Poet’s love, silent through fear, dare not speak openly. Since they will not hear the Poet speak his mind openly, his readers must see what he means in his plays, hearing with their eyes and using their own “love’s fine wit” to discern his deeper meaning.
O learn to read what silent love hath writ,
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.
Bearing in mind Shakespeare’s evident devotion to Thomas More, it would not be too surprising to believe that he had written or collaborated on a play about the English Reformation’s most famous martyr, whose martyrdom served as the archetype and antetype of all the martyrs to follow, including several whom Shakespeare seems to have known personally.12
Returning to the play Sir Thomas More, it is intriguing that the manuscript contains the handwriting of six other people besides that of Shakespeare. It is clearly a collaboration by several of the best-known writers of the day to get the play past the state censor. The censor’s handwriting is one of the six, the other five being the collaborating playwrights, and it is interesting that the censor’s comments illustrate that he is at pains to remove or minimize any suggestion that Thomas More and his fellow martyr, John Fisher, were justified in their refusal to kowtow to Henry VIII’s demands that they sign the Oath of Supremacy. The censor, Sir Edmund Tilney, deleted the whole of the passage in which More and Fisher are shown to be right and virtuous in their opposition to the king’s imposition of a state religion. Tilney’s unease at such praise of Catholic dissidents in the heated religious and political situation in Elizabethan and Jacobean England is hardly surprising. Indeed, one wonders why the playwrights should ever have believed that such overt criticism of Queen Elizabeth’s father and such obvious sympathy for Catholic martyrs would ever escape the censorship of the ever-vigilant Tilney. Quite simply, Thomas More was still a hot potato, more than sixty years after his death, touching a raw nerve, not only with Elizabeth, whose father had the saint’s blood on his hands, but to the Elizabethan state as a whole. As such, any positive depiction of More could be seen as a dangerous indictment of England’s present rulers. Considering that Catholic priests were being put to death in the 1590s and considering that Elizabeth was a jealous guardian of her position as head of the Church of England, inherited from her father, it was surely unthinkable that such a play would ever be approved in Elizabeth’s reign.
Such evidence points inescapably to the play being submitted to Tilney after Elizabeth’s death in March 1603, at a time when it was widely believed that the new king, James I, would show tolerance to Catholicism, as he had hinted in the years before his accession and as was suggested by the fact that his wife was a Catholic. It was seen as confirmation of James’s moderation in religious matters that one of his first acts following his accession was to make peace with Spain, thereby significantly alleviating the religiously charged atmosphere of English foreign policy. In the first year of his reign it was decreed that fines and other penalties would no longer be imposed on Catholics. With the onerous pecuniary burden removed, thousands of closet Catholics stayed away from Anglican services and sought once again to practice their faith fully and openly. “It was at once apparent,” wrote the celebrated Shakespeare scholars Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, “that Elizabeth’s policy of extermination had not achieved its purpose, and that Catholicism still constituted a formidable power in most parts of the country.”13
There is no doubt that England’s beleaguered Catholic population felt a sense of elation that “Bloody Bess” had died, hoping that the decades of relentless persecution would die with her. Shakespeare’s own sense of elation is perhaps evident in the title of the comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, which he wrote at around this time, and also in the writing of Measure for Measure, arguably his most openly Catholic play. It’s almost as though a huge weight had been lifted from the Bard’s overburdened muse and that he felt finally able to express himself more freely without fear of censorship or retribution. If the evidence of these plays is to be believed, it is clear that the “honeymoon period” following James’s accession presented a golden opportunity to publish a play on the martyr Thomas More, which would have been impossible earlier.
Unfortunately, the honeymoon period would be short-lived, lasting from the queen’s death in March 1603 to the renewal of full-blown anti-Catholic persecution in July of the following year. It is extremely likely, therefore, that the play was submitted to Tilney during this sixteen-month period and that the revisions in the handwriting of the other playwrights were also written during this period. Following the renewal of persecution, all hopes of the play getting past the censor would have evaporated as