A parchment bound in leather and kept under lock and key may prove the theory that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic.
An exhibition at the Venerable English College, the seminary in Rome for English Catholic priests, has revealed cryptic names in its guest books for visiting pilgrims, suggesting that the playwright sought refuge there.
“Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” signed the book in 1585, while “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” arrived in 1589.
This has been deciphered as “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford".
In England during Shakespeare's time, it was not unusual to be a SECRET Catholic. In a similar way to how Jews were treated with suspicion in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, all Catholics were viewed as potential traitors and were banned from practising their faith (but were encouraged to take part in Protestant worship), voting and taking public office. This anti-Catholicism became especially heightened after Catholic countries such as Spain and France tried to invade England. Elizabeth I viewed Catholic priests as traitors. Many Catholics tried to practise their faith in secret, often meeting at large country estates where the owners built priest holes (many of which can still be seen to this day), secret hiding places for Catholic priests to hide in should the authorities turn up. Anyone found harbouring Catholics or their priests were also executed. It wasn't until the early 19th Century that Catholics were given full emancipation.
Cryptic signatures that ‘prove Shakespeare was a secret Catholic’
The Times
December 22, 2009
Richard Owen in Rome
A 1586 entry by "Arthurus Stratfordus", thought to be a pseudonym of William Shakespeare, in the visitors' book at the Venerable English College in Rome
Three mysterious signatures on pages of parchment bound in leather and kept under lock and key may prove the theory that William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who spent his “lost years” in Italy.
An exhibition at the Venerable English College, the seminary in Rome for English Catholic priests, has revealed cryptic names in its guest books for visiting pilgrims, suggesting that the playwright sought refuge there.
“Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” signed the book in 1585, while “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” arrived in 1589.
William Shakespeare was born on St George's Day (23rd April) 1564 and died on St George's Day 1616
According to Father Andrew Headon, vice-rector of the college and organiser of the exhibition, the names can be deciphered as “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford”.
A third entry in 1587, “Shfordus Cestriensis”, may stand for “Sh[akespeare from Strat]ford [in the diocese] of Chester”, he said.
The entries fall within the playwright’s “missing years” between 1585, when he left Stratford abruptly, and 1592, when he began his career as playwright in London.
The Venerable English College, Rome
“There are several years which are unaccounted for in Shakespeare’s life,” Father Headon said, adding that it was very likely that the playwright had visited Rome and was a covert Catholic.
The “Shakespeare” entries are being kept in the college’s archive for security reasons but have been reproduced for the exhibition, which illustrates the history of the college from its origins as a medieval pilgrims’ hospice to a refuge for persecuted Catholics during the Reformation.
Set in the college’s extensive 14th-century crypt, the exhibition conveys the clandestine atmosphere of underground Catholicism, with its spies and priests’ bolt holes. It traces the secret journeys made by Catholics to Rome and by Jesuit priests from Rome to England “to defend their faith despite the risk of being caught, tortured and martyred”.
Catholicism in England
For centuries, Catholics were treated as second class citizens in England. England was a Catholic country until 1534 during the reign of Henry VIII. When the Pope refused to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament denied the Pope's authority over the English church, made the monarch the Head of the Church in England (which is still the case), and dissolved England's monasteries and religious orders. Between 1547 and 1553, the Church of England became a Protestant church, with the Latin Mass replaced by the English Book of Common Prayer, and all Catholic practices were banned. Between 1553 and 1558, during the reign of Queen "Bloody" Mary (the daughter of Henry VIII and the Spaniard Catherine of Aragon), England started to go back towards Catholicism as Mary believed this was her mission. During her reign, Mary executed 300 Protestants at the stake. However, when Mary's Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, came to the Throne in 1558, she reversed Mary's re-establishment of Catholicism so that, by the time her reign ended in 1603, England was clearly a Protestant country. During Elizabeth's reign, Catholic powers such as Spain and France tried, and failed, to invade England and this led to huge anti-Catholicism in England, leaving Englishmen to view every Catholic as a potential traitor. Catholics were banned from practising their faith, but were allowed to attend Protestant worship. Elizabeth declared that all Catholic priests were guilty of treason. Elizabeth executed many Catholics during her reign, including her own cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. However, many Catholics tried practising their faith in secret. Many Catholics gathered at large country houses were priests were illegally smuggled in to conduct worship. Many of these places had secret priest holes so that, in the event of the authorities turning up to look for Catholics, the Catholics could hide in one of these ingeniuously hidden places. Many old buildings in England still have their priest holes. It was this banning of Catholicism which led to various plots being concocted against the State, such as the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics tried blowing up the Houses of Parliament. Catholics were not given the right to vote and to hold public office in England until as late as 1829, when Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act.
A priest hole at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. Many stately homes and castles in Tudor and Elizabethan England were installed with these secret hiding places to hide Catholic priests from the authorities
In a recent book, a German biographer of Shakespeare, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, said that she had “come to the conclusion that Shakespeare was a Catholic and that his religion is the key to understanding his life and work”.
Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel said that Shakespeare’s parents, friends and teachers were Catholics, as were some of his patrons, including the Earl of Southampton, who concealed Catholic priests at his country seat, Titchfield Abbey, and his London residence.
Further proof was his purchase of the eastern gatehouse at Blackfriars — a secret meeting place for fugitive Catholics — in London in 1613, she said.
Backers of the theory say that plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure are “rich in Catholic thought and rituals”, with positive depictions of priests and monks and invocations of the Virgin Mary.
Five of his 37 plays are set in Italy, another five wholly or partly in Rome and three in Sicily.
The English College exhibition, Non Angli sed Angeli, runs until July 2010.
Ten things you didn't know about Shakespeare
1 Shakespeare caused an air crash
There was an American Shakespeare fan called Eugene Schieffelin, a drugs manufacturer in the 1890s. He decided that he wanted New York to be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays, so released skylarks, thrushes and starlings. The starlings stayed on Manhattan for about six years, nesting in the eaves of the Natural History Museum, but then they started to migrate. By 1942 they had reached California, and before too long you could find starlings from Alaska to Florida. They have now ousted natural species such as bluebirds and woodpeckers, and grow into flocks of millions. On October 4, 1960, a Lockheed Electra aircraft taking off from Boston airport stirred up a flock of more than 10,000 starlings on the runway. They choked the engines and brought the plane down, killing 62 people. There is actually only one reference in Shakespeare to starlings in Henry IV, Part 1. That one line created an ecological upset, and a human disaster.
2 Shakespeare was attacked by Apaches
Two English brothers arrived in a ghost town in the Pyramid Mountains, New Mexico, in the 1870s to set up a mining company. They changed the town's name to Shakespeare, called the main street Avon Avenue, and the old hotel became The Stratford. Apparently Billy the Kid used to wash dishes there. There was a railway line that came through Shakespeare taking material from the mines, and, because of the wealth of the town, it was attacked by Apaches, who were doing everything they could to get rid of the white settlers who had encroached on their land. So the Shakespeare guard was formed in the 1880s to protect the settlement from further attacks.
3 Shakespeare hid on Robben Island
There was a copy of Shakespeare on Robben Island prison that one of the Indian ANC inmates had disguised as a Hindu prayer book. It got handed around, and various inmates would read it and underline their favourite quotations and autograph them. Walter Sisulu underlined “For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”, Shylock's line from The Merchant of Venice. Another ANC inmate underlined Caliban's line from The Tempest: “This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother.” So you get very different spins on apartheid between those two quotations. Nelson Mandela's favourite quote was from Julius Caesar, when Caesar himself says: “Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant only taste of death but once.”
4 Shakespeare was big in Africa
The first time that Shakespeare was performed outside the UK was during Shakespeare's lifetime in 1607 - rather astonishingly, it was off Sierra Leone in Africa. In order to keep his crew busy, William Keeling, the captain of a ship called The Red Dragon, got them to rehearse Hamlet while sailing around Africa on its way to India. When they arrived at Sierra Leone, he invited local people and his fellows from the neighbouring ship on board to watch the first international performance of Shakespeare. On their way round the Cape of Good Hope they did Richard III.
5 Actors were paid not to perform Shakespeare
After Shakespeare died, his company, the King's Men, were still active, and while on tour in the West Midlands they decided to visit Stratford, probably to see the bust of Shakespeare that had recently been put up in Holy Trinity church. We know that they arrived there in 1622 because in the town records is an entry that says: “To the King's Men, not to perform, 6 shillings.” It was a rather Puritan town, and they didn't want any performance. Ordinarily, they would have just banned the actors and sent them off, but seeing that they were the King's Men, they thought they had better at least pay them some kind of compensation. There were no performances of Shakespeare in Stratford until 1786.
6 Shakespeare's screen history is longer than you think
The first Shakespeare film made was of King John in 1899, but it so happens that 2011 is the centenary of the first Shakespeare film from Stratford. Next year, the film of David Tennant's Hamlet will be screened on the BBC at Christmas, and then there will be the DVD, the first Shakespeare film of 2011. Exactly 100 years before this release, Richard III was filmed on the stage at Stratford. Of course, it was silent, so they had to mouth the lines, gesture a lot, and perform under incredible arc lights.
7 Shakespeare adapted Cervantes
We have found a bit of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio, based on an episode in Don Quixote by Cervantes, and the RSC is going to be putting it on when the new theatre opens. There was an adaptation done in the 18th century, and we've been working from that with a Spanish writer who is an expert on Cervantes to fill in the missing gaps. It is known to have been performed in 1613.
8 Shakespeare's tomb was almost raided
A woman called Delia Bacon tried to open Shakespeare's tomb in the 1850s. She was a bit of a Shakespeare nut and one of the first people to suggest that Shakespeare was written not by Shakespeare - of course, one of the people she claimed it was written by was her namesake, Francis Bacon (although apparently not related to her). She claimed that the evidence would somehow be revealed by opening his tomb and managed to persuade people to let her stay in Holy Trinity church overnight.She wrote an account of how spooky it was in the church, and how she felt like Guy Fawkes with her lantern. In the end she got frightened off and didn't open the tomb. Though the tomb's curse - “curst be he that moves my bones” - may have come true anyway: afterwards she began to believe that she was the Holy Ghost. Her nephew had to come from America and take her back there, where she died in 1859 in an asylum.
9 Shakespeare's character was written in the stars
Shakespeare was born under Taurus in the Zodiac, but he was also born in the Year of the Rat, which according to Chinese cosmology means that he might have been ambitious and power-hungry, but might also have had a great imagination.
10 Shakespeare rewrote his own history
Twelfth Night tells of two twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated by a shipwreck. Shakespeare was a father of twins and, according to the registrar records in Holy Trinity church, they were baptised on February 2, on Candlemas. The first recorded performance of Twelfth Night was at Candlemas, on February 2, 1602, exactly 17 years later. Judith and Hamnet, the twins, had been separated by death, because the brother Hamnet had died suddenly at the age of 11 in 1596. So poor Judith celebrated her 17th birthday by herself. It's extraordinary to think that Shakespeare could write this play about twins separated and then, through his art, could reunite them.
timesonline.co.uk
An exhibition at the Venerable English College, the seminary in Rome for English Catholic priests, has revealed cryptic names in its guest books for visiting pilgrims, suggesting that the playwright sought refuge there.
“Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” signed the book in 1585, while “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” arrived in 1589.
This has been deciphered as “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford".
In England during Shakespeare's time, it was not unusual to be a SECRET Catholic. In a similar way to how Jews were treated with suspicion in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, all Catholics were viewed as potential traitors and were banned from practising their faith (but were encouraged to take part in Protestant worship), voting and taking public office. This anti-Catholicism became especially heightened after Catholic countries such as Spain and France tried to invade England. Elizabeth I viewed Catholic priests as traitors. Many Catholics tried to practise their faith in secret, often meeting at large country estates where the owners built priest holes (many of which can still be seen to this day), secret hiding places for Catholic priests to hide in should the authorities turn up. Anyone found harbouring Catholics or their priests were also executed. It wasn't until the early 19th Century that Catholics were given full emancipation.
Cryptic signatures that ‘prove Shakespeare was a secret Catholic’
The Times
December 22, 2009
Richard Owen in Rome
A 1586 entry by "Arthurus Stratfordus", thought to be a pseudonym of William Shakespeare, in the visitors' book at the Venerable English College in Rome
Three mysterious signatures on pages of parchment bound in leather and kept under lock and key may prove the theory that William Shakespeare was a secret Catholic who spent his “lost years” in Italy.
An exhibition at the Venerable English College, the seminary in Rome for English Catholic priests, has revealed cryptic names in its guest books for visiting pilgrims, suggesting that the playwright sought refuge there.
“Arthurus Stratfordus Wigomniensis” signed the book in 1585, while “Gulielmus Clerkue Stratfordiensis” arrived in 1589.
William Shakespeare was born on St George's Day (23rd April) 1564 and died on St George's Day 1616
According to Father Andrew Headon, vice-rector of the college and organiser of the exhibition, the names can be deciphered as “[King] Arthur’s [compatriot] from Stratford [in the diocese] of Worcester” and “William the Clerk from Stratford”.
A third entry in 1587, “Shfordus Cestriensis”, may stand for “Sh[akespeare from Strat]ford [in the diocese] of Chester”, he said.
The entries fall within the playwright’s “missing years” between 1585, when he left Stratford abruptly, and 1592, when he began his career as playwright in London.
The Venerable English College, Rome
“There are several years which are unaccounted for in Shakespeare’s life,” Father Headon said, adding that it was very likely that the playwright had visited Rome and was a covert Catholic.
The “Shakespeare” entries are being kept in the college’s archive for security reasons but have been reproduced for the exhibition, which illustrates the history of the college from its origins as a medieval pilgrims’ hospice to a refuge for persecuted Catholics during the Reformation.
Set in the college’s extensive 14th-century crypt, the exhibition conveys the clandestine atmosphere of underground Catholicism, with its spies and priests’ bolt holes. It traces the secret journeys made by Catholics to Rome and by Jesuit priests from Rome to England “to defend their faith despite the risk of being caught, tortured and martyred”.
Catholicism in England
For centuries, Catholics were treated as second class citizens in England. England was a Catholic country until 1534 during the reign of Henry VIII. When the Pope refused to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the English Parliament denied the Pope's authority over the English church, made the monarch the Head of the Church in England (which is still the case), and dissolved England's monasteries and religious orders. Between 1547 and 1553, the Church of England became a Protestant church, with the Latin Mass replaced by the English Book of Common Prayer, and all Catholic practices were banned. Between 1553 and 1558, during the reign of Queen "Bloody" Mary (the daughter of Henry VIII and the Spaniard Catherine of Aragon), England started to go back towards Catholicism as Mary believed this was her mission. During her reign, Mary executed 300 Protestants at the stake. However, when Mary's Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, came to the Throne in 1558, she reversed Mary's re-establishment of Catholicism so that, by the time her reign ended in 1603, England was clearly a Protestant country. During Elizabeth's reign, Catholic powers such as Spain and France tried, and failed, to invade England and this led to huge anti-Catholicism in England, leaving Englishmen to view every Catholic as a potential traitor. Catholics were banned from practising their faith, but were allowed to attend Protestant worship. Elizabeth declared that all Catholic priests were guilty of treason. Elizabeth executed many Catholics during her reign, including her own cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. However, many Catholics tried practising their faith in secret. Many Catholics gathered at large country houses were priests were illegally smuggled in to conduct worship. Many of these places had secret priest holes so that, in the event of the authorities turning up to look for Catholics, the Catholics could hide in one of these ingeniuously hidden places. Many old buildings in England still have their priest holes. It was this banning of Catholicism which led to various plots being concocted against the State, such as the Gunpowder Plot, in which a group of Catholics tried blowing up the Houses of Parliament. Catholics were not given the right to vote and to hold public office in England until as late as 1829, when Parliament passed the Catholic Emancipation Act.
A priest hole at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. Many stately homes and castles in Tudor and Elizabethan England were installed with these secret hiding places to hide Catholic priests from the authorities
In a recent book, a German biographer of Shakespeare, Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, said that she had “come to the conclusion that Shakespeare was a Catholic and that his religion is the key to understanding his life and work”.
Professor Hammerschmidt-Hummel said that Shakespeare’s parents, friends and teachers were Catholics, as were some of his patrons, including the Earl of Southampton, who concealed Catholic priests at his country seat, Titchfield Abbey, and his London residence.
Further proof was his purchase of the eastern gatehouse at Blackfriars — a secret meeting place for fugitive Catholics — in London in 1613, she said.
Backers of the theory say that plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure are “rich in Catholic thought and rituals”, with positive depictions of priests and monks and invocations of the Virgin Mary.
Five of his 37 plays are set in Italy, another five wholly or partly in Rome and three in Sicily.
The English College exhibition, Non Angli sed Angeli, runs until July 2010.
Ten things you didn't know about Shakespeare
1 Shakespeare caused an air crash
There was an American Shakespeare fan called Eugene Schieffelin, a drugs manufacturer in the 1890s. He decided that he wanted New York to be home to all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare's plays, so released skylarks, thrushes and starlings. The starlings stayed on Manhattan for about six years, nesting in the eaves of the Natural History Museum, but then they started to migrate. By 1942 they had reached California, and before too long you could find starlings from Alaska to Florida. They have now ousted natural species such as bluebirds and woodpeckers, and grow into flocks of millions. On October 4, 1960, a Lockheed Electra aircraft taking off from Boston airport stirred up a flock of more than 10,000 starlings on the runway. They choked the engines and brought the plane down, killing 62 people. There is actually only one reference in Shakespeare to starlings in Henry IV, Part 1. That one line created an ecological upset, and a human disaster.
2 Shakespeare was attacked by Apaches
Two English brothers arrived in a ghost town in the Pyramid Mountains, New Mexico, in the 1870s to set up a mining company. They changed the town's name to Shakespeare, called the main street Avon Avenue, and the old hotel became The Stratford. Apparently Billy the Kid used to wash dishes there. There was a railway line that came through Shakespeare taking material from the mines, and, because of the wealth of the town, it was attacked by Apaches, who were doing everything they could to get rid of the white settlers who had encroached on their land. So the Shakespeare guard was formed in the 1880s to protect the settlement from further attacks.
3 Shakespeare hid on Robben Island
There was a copy of Shakespeare on Robben Island prison that one of the Indian ANC inmates had disguised as a Hindu prayer book. It got handed around, and various inmates would read it and underline their favourite quotations and autograph them. Walter Sisulu underlined “For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe”, Shylock's line from The Merchant of Venice. Another ANC inmate underlined Caliban's line from The Tempest: “This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother.” So you get very different spins on apartheid between those two quotations. Nelson Mandela's favourite quote was from Julius Caesar, when Caesar himself says: “Cowards die many times before their death, the valiant only taste of death but once.”
4 Shakespeare was big in Africa
The first time that Shakespeare was performed outside the UK was during Shakespeare's lifetime in 1607 - rather astonishingly, it was off Sierra Leone in Africa. In order to keep his crew busy, William Keeling, the captain of a ship called The Red Dragon, got them to rehearse Hamlet while sailing around Africa on its way to India. When they arrived at Sierra Leone, he invited local people and his fellows from the neighbouring ship on board to watch the first international performance of Shakespeare. On their way round the Cape of Good Hope they did Richard III.
5 Actors were paid not to perform Shakespeare
After Shakespeare died, his company, the King's Men, were still active, and while on tour in the West Midlands they decided to visit Stratford, probably to see the bust of Shakespeare that had recently been put up in Holy Trinity church. We know that they arrived there in 1622 because in the town records is an entry that says: “To the King's Men, not to perform, 6 shillings.” It was a rather Puritan town, and they didn't want any performance. Ordinarily, they would have just banned the actors and sent them off, but seeing that they were the King's Men, they thought they had better at least pay them some kind of compensation. There were no performances of Shakespeare in Stratford until 1786.
6 Shakespeare's screen history is longer than you think
The first Shakespeare film made was of King John in 1899, but it so happens that 2011 is the centenary of the first Shakespeare film from Stratford. Next year, the film of David Tennant's Hamlet will be screened on the BBC at Christmas, and then there will be the DVD, the first Shakespeare film of 2011. Exactly 100 years before this release, Richard III was filmed on the stage at Stratford. Of course, it was silent, so they had to mouth the lines, gesture a lot, and perform under incredible arc lights.
7 Shakespeare adapted Cervantes
We have found a bit of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio, based on an episode in Don Quixote by Cervantes, and the RSC is going to be putting it on when the new theatre opens. There was an adaptation done in the 18th century, and we've been working from that with a Spanish writer who is an expert on Cervantes to fill in the missing gaps. It is known to have been performed in 1613.
8 Shakespeare's tomb was almost raided
A woman called Delia Bacon tried to open Shakespeare's tomb in the 1850s. She was a bit of a Shakespeare nut and one of the first people to suggest that Shakespeare was written not by Shakespeare - of course, one of the people she claimed it was written by was her namesake, Francis Bacon (although apparently not related to her). She claimed that the evidence would somehow be revealed by opening his tomb and managed to persuade people to let her stay in Holy Trinity church overnight.She wrote an account of how spooky it was in the church, and how she felt like Guy Fawkes with her lantern. In the end she got frightened off and didn't open the tomb. Though the tomb's curse - “curst be he that moves my bones” - may have come true anyway: afterwards she began to believe that she was the Holy Ghost. Her nephew had to come from America and take her back there, where she died in 1859 in an asylum.
9 Shakespeare's character was written in the stars
Shakespeare was born under Taurus in the Zodiac, but he was also born in the Year of the Rat, which according to Chinese cosmology means that he might have been ambitious and power-hungry, but might also have had a great imagination.
10 Shakespeare rewrote his own history
Twelfth Night tells of two twins, Viola and Sebastian, who are separated by a shipwreck. Shakespeare was a father of twins and, according to the registrar records in Holy Trinity church, they were baptised on February 2, on Candlemas. The first recorded performance of Twelfth Night was at Candlemas, on February 2, 1602, exactly 17 years later. Judith and Hamnet, the twins, had been separated by death, because the brother Hamnet had died suddenly at the age of 11 in 1596. So poor Judith celebrated her 17th birthday by herself. It's extraordinary to think that Shakespeare could write this play about twins separated and then, through his art, could reunite them.
timesonline.co.uk
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