UK Edition
Shakespeare was a Catholic sympathiser who left 'coded political messages' in his work
His plays and sonnets have enriched the English language beyond measure and left us a literary legacy still performed, read and studied around the world to this day.
But it is now being claimed there was an unknown side to William Shakespeare - that of political commentator and champion of England’s oppressed Catholic minority.
The Elizabethan playwright is often regarded as having been apolitical, with little to say on contemporary politics, but a Shakespeare scholar has argued that he was in fact deeply engaged with one of the biggest issues of the day.
Clare Asquith, the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, has suggested that his early epic poem The Rape of Lucrece is, at nearly 2,000 lines, neither a poem nor about the rape of a Roman noblewoman; but is in fact a political pamphlet decrying the persecution of the country’s Catholics.
She has reinterpreted Shakespeare’s poem, written in 1594, as an extended account of the Act of Supremacy of 1534 and the destruction of old Catholic England by the Protestants, following the establishment of the Church of England under Henry VIII.
The poem is ostensibly about the rape of Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, by Tarquin, the son of the king of Rome.
In the story - first told by the Roman poet Ovid and later painted by Rembrandt - this outrageous crime inspires an insurrection led by Collatine’s friend Brutus, leading to the foundation of the first Roman republic.
But in Lady Asquith’s reading the violence and grief recounted in the poem are code for the destruction of the Catholic church’s monasteries; the selling off of its land and artworks; the demolition of stained glass and church decorations; and the destruction of the charitable almshouses, their property handed over to already rich landowners.
“His audience would have understood the references contained in the poem, whether it was the King, the Court or its victims,” she said. “The Catholics and the reformers were the victims and he uses terminology that would have provided comfort to them and make a plea to the court for tolerance.
“The Rape of Lucrece is an extended allegory for what happened to England, to the Catholics and the reformers at the hands of the newly established church and the Privy Council, led by William Cecil, the man who set up the first secret services and had a file on pretty much everyone.”
Shakespeare’s poem has previously been regarded as one of his least successful works, written when the young playwright was in search of an aristocratic patron and hoping to impress the Earl of Southampton.
Lady Asquith speculates that the poem may have been commissioned by Southampton’s fellow rebel the Earl of Essex, who championed religious tolerance.
She lays out her radical interpretation in her new book Shakespeare and the Resistance; The Earl of Southampton, the Essex Rebellion and the Poems that Challenged Tudor Tyranny, which was published last week.
The persecution of England’s Catholics followed the act of Parliament that recognized Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England and established the Anglican church as the spiritual authority of the nation, in opposition to Catholicism and the authority of the Pope in Rome.
Lady Asquith first began exploring the hidden subtext of Shakespeare's plays after noting the coded messages in plays by Soviet dissidents while her husband Raymond served as a diplomat in Moscow, during the Cold War,
She says it has long been difficult for many literary critics to recognise the political nature of Shakespeare’s work.
“He was far from apolitical and we only think he was because we don't know what the sides were,” she said. “All his work has a political undertext which we don’t recognise because we don't recognise the history and events to which he is alluding.
“But he was, in a veiled way, referring to the political disputes of the time. The Rape of Lucrece is about life under a police state and the attempt at regime change.”