The plays of Shakespeare, among the greatest dramatic works ever written, send forth a multitude of characters that move against the forces of the world by way of an inner vitality. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius direct those seeking life with God against the forces of the world and toward mystical union by way of an inner spiritual journey. This ground-breaking study reveals the startling convergence of Ignatian spirituality and Renaissance artistry in the canon of Shakespeare. As part of an emerging understanding of Shakespeare's religious sympathies, the study places the Bard within a literary movement promoted by the early Society of Jesus to counter the fledgling Anglican Church. The world of historical Shakespeare unfolds as one of bitter struggle and witness to Jesuit martyrdom within a changing religious landscape. For the first time, literary evidence linking Shakespeare to the Jesuits is revealed. The discovery adds another shard to the fragments of biographical detail on the man called William Shakespeare.
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Andrea Campana. Shakespeare and the Jesuits
Shakespeare and the Jesuits ‘To Fight the Fight’ Andrea Campana
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
Shakespeare and the Jesuit John Floyd
John Floyd and the Canon of Shakespeare
Shakespeare in Context
Finding God’s Will: the Tragedies
The Way of Descent and Looking Upward: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet
The Allegory of Marriage
Numerical Patterns in the Sonnets
The Spirit of the Sonnets
“The Phoenix and the Turtle” Un-Shrouded
“Poems of Devotion”
Shakespeare’s Gravestone
Appendix: Notes
Appendix: Selected Bibliography
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This book is dedicated to the loves of my life, Ed and Giulia, my husband and daughter. I thank them from my heart for their patience and perseverance—the two sustaining qualities of the Jesuit mission—and for allowing me the indulgence of this project. Fortunately, the large doses of frustration handed to them were often met with large doses of humor.
Lastly, I would like to say that, despite my 20 years as a journalist with impartiality as a second nature, and despite the current trend to veer from hagiographical studies of the Catholic martyrs, I have found it virtually impossible to conduct this research without “floods of tears,” as John Floyd, punning on his own name, though not humorously, says of his grief for “the slain of my country.” And as Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) says in Henry VI, Part I, “One drop of blood drawn from thy country’s bosom/Should grieve thee more than streams of foreign gore./Return thee therefore with a flood of tears,/And wash away thy country’s stained spots.”
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WC: “lay before their eyes as it were upon a Theater, the whole most execrable spectacle of that rufull slaughter” (18)
