Shakespeare and the Jesuits
Sir, – I share Peter Davidson’s and Thomas McCoog’s scepticism about claims that Shakespeare was a practising Catholic, or was involved with the Jesuits (Commentary, March 16). But the authenticity or otherwise of the Spiritual Testament signed by the poet’s father John Shakespeare in the early 1580s is quite another matter, and has a more direct bearing on their argument than they allow. The Testament, supposedly discovered by a bricklayer in the roof of the Shakespeare house in Stratford, and published by Edward Malone in 1790, is a translation of a devout declaration of Catholic faith drawn up by Carlo Borromeo, for the use of laypeople dying without the services of a priest during the Milan plague of 1578. Borromeo’s document, an ideal pastoral tool in regions where priests were scarce, was to have a long life in Counter-Reformation missions in the Americas as well as Europe. It is (just) possible that John Shakespeare’s Testament is an ingenious forgery, but if it is genuine it is hard to see how he could have got hold of so dangerous, so recent and so exotic a document, unless directly or indirectly from Edmund Campion or Robert Parsons, who had lodged with Borromeo in Milan on their way to England, and who might well have seen in it a comfort for English Catholics deprived of reliable access to priests.
It is surely inconsistent to argue, as Davidson and McCoog do, that the Jesuits would not have imported Borromeo’s document into England because their General had forbidden them to court danger by trafficking in religious objects proscribed by the Elizabethan government. If the Spiritual Testament came under that prohibition, so emphatically would the Rheims New Testament, with its ferocious polemical notes, but which, on their account, Parsons was eager to distribute. Between 3,000 and 4,000 copies of the bulky Rheims New Testament, moreover, seems an implausibly large smuggler’s load: 3,000 copies of the Spiritual Testament, by contrast, would have fitted comfortably into a large knapsack. On this aspect of their case, at least, the jury must remain out.
EAMON DUFFY
Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Sir, – Peter Davidson and Thomas McCoog, in their Commentary on the evidence linking Shakespeare and the Jesuits, dismiss as insignificant the reception by Carlo Borromeo, Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, of the English Jesuits Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons in 1580. Davidson and McCoog aver, for example, that “There were other ecclesiastics in the party far more important than the English Jesuits”. Among such circumstantial evidence against the likelihood of a significant meeting at which Campion and Parsons could have received Borromeo’s spiritual testament from him, Davidson and McCoog also assert that “Relations between the Cardinal of Milan and the Society of Jesus were in fact strained in 1580”.
Leaving aside the characterization of Borromeo this depends on, as being haughty and petty – when he was in fact a man renowned for his humility and wisdom – it is contradicted by the following from The Life of St Charles Borromeo (1884). The latter is a translation of Giovanni Pietro Giussano’s Vita di S Carlo Borromeo (1610); and the footnotes to this translation are drawn from additions to Giussano’s text by Balthassar Oltrocchi (Giussano and Oltrocchi both being of a society of oblates founded by Borromeo), included in a Latin version of the Vita published in 1751. In one of these footnotes to the 1884 translation (Volume Two, pp448–9) it is recorded that a number of Catholic Englishmen, clerics and laymen, all but one of them named, including Fathers Campion and Parsons, visited Borromeo in May 1580: they “were received into his house at Milan by St. Charles, and kept there for eight days”. Campion “discoursed every day after dinner”. Parsons observed that Borromeo “had sundry learned and most godly speeches with us, tending to the contempt of this world and perfect zeal of Christ’s service, whereof we saw so rare an example in himself, and his austere and laborious life; being nothing but skin and bone, through continual pains, fasting, and penance . . . ”. Borromeo wrote from Milan at the end of June to Alfonso Agazzari (a Jesuit), President of the English College at Rome:
"I saw and willingly received those English who departed hence the other day, as their goodness deserved, and the cause for which they had undertaken their journey. If in future your Reverence shall send any others to me, be assured that I will take care to receive them with all charity, and that it will be most pleasing to me to have occasion to perform the duties of hospitality, so proper for a Bishop, towards the Catholics of that nation."
JOHN SHAW
29 Armstrong Street, Preston.
Sir, – Peter Davidson’s and Thomas McCoog’s persuasive use of original sources to disprove the existence of John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament and alleged connections between Shakespeare and the Jesuits can be taken further. In an article shortly to be published in Shakespeare Yearbook, I discuss Richard Wilson’s claim that Edmund Campion reconciled John Shakespeare at Sir William Catesby’s house at Lapworth, near Stratford, and took William Shakespeare to Lancashire, to masquerade as William Shakeshafte in Alexander Hoghton’s household. In fact, Campion’s itinerary excluded Warwickshire and Stratford. The manuscripts of Catesby’s Star Chamber trial reveal that Campion stayed only at Catesby’s other house, at Ashby St Leger in Northamptonshire. There is no evidence connecting Robert Parsons with Stratford. The argument that John Shakespeare merely concealed his “recusancy” in 1592 by pleading fear of arrest for debt is contradicted by a careful examination of the original documents of the Warwickshire recusancy commission in their historical context, which confirms Robert Bearman’s argument that John’s excuse was genuine. In another article currently with a journal I adduce evidence more plausibly identifying the William Shakeshafte of Alexander Hoghton’s 1581 will as William Shakeshafte Jr, a Preston glover involved in a complex Duchy of Lancaster court case in 1606–09. Nor does the evidence place Campion at Hoghton Tower. None of this evidence bears on Shakespeare’s nostalgia for Catholicism in his works, but it does decisively separate him from the Counter-Reformation.
GLYN PARRY
Department of History, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
Auden’s whereabouts
Sir, – John Sutherland’s report on MI5’s suspicions of W. H. Auden’s involvement in the flight of Burgess and Maclean (Commentary, March 16) omits the most startling revelation of all: the agent assigned to the case was Inspector Clouseau, later famous for other investigations that he conducted with the same degree of ingenuity and skill. Who else could have convinced himself that Auden was evading MI5 during a mysterious “prolonged absence in the North of Italy”, at exactly the moment when Auden was more visible to the public than he had ever been in his life? Had Clouseau switched on the radio or opened a newspaper, he could have learned that Auden was surrounded by reporters in Milan where he was helping the La Scala chorus in its rehearsals for The Rake’s Progress, and then attended the premiere in Venice, where he evaded MI5 by giving a radio interview during the interval and taking his bows before the footlights at the end.
Clouseau was also suspicious about Auden’s departure for New York shortly afterwards, not having noticed that Auden had also followed the same schedule at the end of the past three summers, and that anyone who wanted to trace him to his New York hideout could have found his address in the telephone directory. Meanwhile, Clouseau was searching for Auden’s non-existent younger brother, whom he now triumphantly identified as one Arthur G. Auden, otherwise unknown to history, whose name he uncovered in the telephone directory for London.
MI5 wanted to find Auden to ask about a phone call that Burgess had tried to make to him in London a few days before Burgess and Maclean disappeared on May 25, 1951. Clouseau’s finest moments were his memos demanding to know whether Auden had taken a phone call from Burgess in Ischia on May 24, despite the fact that Auden was in London that day. The police in Naples insisted that Auden had taken the call in Italy, despite the physical impossibility of his having done so, but MI6, which seems consistently to have been more alert than MI5, observed that the Neapolitans were probably mistaken.
Professor Sutherland suggests that the Soviets used Auden as a distraction, but the truth is probably less interesting. Burgess had been planning for months to take a summer holiday on Ischia, and he later told Tom Driberg that he had been trying to reach Auden to set up a visit, but his plans changed when it became obvious that he would need to flee together with Maclean. In 1953, even MI5 realized that Auden had had nothing to do with the affair, and rescinded its order to keep track of his arrivals in Britain. By this time, apparently, Clouseau had been transferred to the Sûreté.
EDWARD MENDELSON
Department of English, Columbia University, New York 10027.
Flayed for a wineskin
Sir, – I enjoyed Angela Hobbs’s review of William D. Desmond’s book on the origins of Cynicism, The Greek Praise of Poverty (March 23). She rightly disputes his claim that virtually all classical Greeks were wary of wealth. According to Plutarch, one of Solon’s critics was ready “to be flayed for a wineskin”, if only he had “gained wealth untold and been tyrant of Athens for just one day”, while in Aristophanes’ late play Wealth Cario agrees with Chremylus that men only pray to Zeus because he is richer than all the other gods and they want to be just like him. “Wealth” was defined as the condition in which a man could live without working (and was closely linked to peace, as a famous statue-group shows), “poverty” as the condition in which he could only live by working, a situation that robbed him of independent action and, in the worst case, of personal freedom, the ultimate horror. In a land where the living was hard, Diogenes’ countrymen had little inclination to share his contempt of wealth and every reason to dream of riches.
JOHN DAVIE
St Paul’s School, Lonsdale Road, London SW13.
Benedict Arnold
Sir, –Nathan Greenfield opens his review of Benedict Arnold’s Navy by James L. Nelson (In Brief, February 23) with a bold assertion: “Of all Americans, only Benedict Arnold’s name has become an eponym”. One can appreciate that eponymous products are a different matter entirely, and for these purposes agree to exclude fictional eponyms like Uncle Tom. John Hancock presents a peculiar case, since his autograph has the eponym. Houdini is an eponym, but his stage name is a pseudonym. The problem with “lynch” is that William Lynch engaged only in non-lethal lynch law. Perhaps fittingly, that seems to leave Samuel Maverick standing alone in challenge to Arnold’s title – and when he left the United States, it was to go to Texas.
GEORGE C. COMNINEL
Department of Political Science, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto.
Archie Andrews
Sir, – In his review of Spike and Co by Graham McCann (February 23), Eric Korn, usually master of the arcane detail, must have been momentarily distracted when he asked, apropos Archie Andrews, “Has anyone explained the wireless appeal of unseen marionettes?”. Archie Andrews was, of course, not a marionette but a ventriloquist’s dummy. He starred with his operator Peter Brough in the popular 1950s radio series Educating Archie. The infinitely more bizarre concept of delivering a ventriloquist act by radio never seemed to bother anyone at the time, however.
PETER NEWMAN
26 4th Street, Toronto.
