Pilgrim Ways

clergyman, Archdeacon Davies, had no doubt of Shakespeare's beliefs for he wrote: "He dyed a Papyst." Rather than having a narrowing or stifling influence, it was precisely the effect of Lancashire's great houses - with their links to the Continent and the Catholic world - that stimulated Shakespeare and created the unique environment in which he crafted his work.

Campion's arrest on July 16th 1581 led to his imprisonment in the Tower, where he was racked. The information which his torturers extracted was like a smoking gun which would be held at the heads of the great Lancashire Catholic families - the Hoghtons, the Heskeths and the Derbys - and, indeed, many of their homes were raided and leading figures were arrested . On August 3rd, it triggered the hasty writing of a will in which Alexander Hoghton, the owner of Hoghton Tower, devolved his estate and made arrangements for "William Shakeshaft to be taken into the protection of Sir Thomas Hesketh," his neighbour, in Rufford.

He was subsequently passed to Lord Strange who brought the player to London in 1590.

Richard Wilson argues that Shakespeare remained a part of the underground recusant Church, secretly believing and secretly practising his faith, and using his verse subtly to challenge the new religious settlement. Here is the hope of a second spring, nostalgia for the Catholic England which has been lost, an embodiment of tragic figures who suffer but do not reveal the secrets of their hearts, and the description of a world of aliases and double identities.

Sonnet 73, he says, is "a Sonnet for lost Catholicism": That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet bids sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all the rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie...

In The Winter's Tale, Wilson points to the statue scene where Hermione steps down from her pedestal and weeps. He asks us to read the Histories in relation to the claims made in Conference on Succession (1595), written by Father Robert Parsons, head of the Jesuit mission, advocating the Catholic claims of the House of Lancaster. He cites references to the Catholic belief in purgatory and the last sacraments in Hamlet and points us to the plays written at the end of his career, the supernatural and magical plays which seek to restore a lost world, with Prospero, in The Tempest, pleading for something like religious toleration.

Unlike virtually all of his contemporaries Shakespeare does not denigrate priests and friars, women in the religious life, or the Church; quite the reverse. In The Comedy of Errors, for example, an Abbess appears to prevent tragedy and through "her holy prayers" brings resolution and harmony. Conversely, in Falstaff he parodies the new hypocrisies, which quote endlessly from the Bible to support their sins. The Shakespearean texts were, then, recusant themselves, using a secret encoded language of maimed rights and rights suppressed. Richard Wilson says: "It's all there, all the way through" and that the secularisation and metropolitanisation of Shakespeare has been a travesty. In re-reading the texts - Cordelia, for instance, declaring how much she loves the king or John of Gaunt's "sceptered isle" speech we can see pleas for the right to believe in return for Catholic loyalty to the Crown; and we can read a memorialisation of a lost Catholic England. Certainly Shakespeare's own contemporaries had no doubt about his faith. In 1611, the historian John Speed linked him with Father Robert Parsons as "this Papist and his Poet", and he was vilified by Puritans for