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Every story about William Shakespeare begins with Ben Jonson. His oft-quoted tribute of 1623 rings out and confers upon Shakespeare a quality of immortality that persists to this day: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” So began the worldwide cult of Bard worship a mere seven years after Shakespeare’s death, with the publishing of the First Folio of 36 plays.

The power of Shakespeare to elicit the creative and critical response continues unabated. In today’s literary milieu, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series of vampire romance novels, inspired in part by Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, has sold more than 100 million copies in some 37 languages. Shakespeare no doubt has sketched the borders of culture for all nations. He is celebrated for his rhetorical finesse to shape fictional characters into realistic portraits of a broad swath of humanity, offering insight into the most elemental of our behaviors and motivations.

End of story? Not quite. Too many loose ends remain untied. Although the immortality of Shakespeare triumphs, and his work has lost neither its authenticity nor vitality among purists, his characters, themes, and plots, as well as the dramatist’s personal motivations, have been reinvented by playwrights, poets, composers, novelists, moviemakers, and literary critics as a way to retrofit them into the cultural or political bias of the moment.

This is due to a penumbra that surrounds the enigmatic figure of Shakespeare, a shroud of mystery that continues to eclipse the source of his immortality and to cloud the deepest inspiration of his work. The dramatist taunts us with such lines as, “His givings-out were of an infinite distance/From his true-meant design,” spoken by Lucio in Measure for Measure (1.4.55), leaping off the stage and the page as if we are to discern a hint of biographical truth. His “true-meant design” has remained stubbornly out of plain view. At the same time, a dearth of seamless biographical information fuels an authorship debate not unlike the conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination. T.S. Eliot came closest to unraveling the secret of Shakespeare, when the 20^thcentury poet sensed the existence of a “pattern in Shakespeare’s carpet.”

With Ben Jonson as our guide, we may emerge from these purgatorial shadows. An able dramatist and poet in his own right, the wit-trading tavern-mate and sometime rival of the great Bard interests today’s crop of literary critics mostly for what he knew about Shakespeare. What has remained unnoticed for 400 years is the significance of five other words issued from the pen of Jonson that are far more relevant to the life of Shakespeare. “Can man forget this storie?” Jonson writes in the last line of “Poems of Devotion,” the product of his dying years. The three-lyric sequence reveals a man prepared to confront his own guilt, as well as the collective guilt of England, over a matter Jonson apparently could not shake from his memory: the staggering brutality leveled against Jesuit missionary priests during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Through both content and form, the “Poems of Devotion” sequence expresses Jonson’s deep desire for harmony with the divine, while pleading forgiveness for the sin of Jesuit execution. Jonson may have been a tough man of letters, but he was a principled one with an eye for recognizing virtue in a superficial age. As with other poets whose work veiled political commentary, Jonson was acutely aware of the social role of poetry, and his writing was marked by a satirical bent aimed at a society widely perceived as corrupt. While in prison in 1598, he was converted by a priest to Catholicism, and a religious vision informs much of his poetry.

In “Poems of Devotion,” Jonson unmistakably models his poems on the early but essential steps of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. In the process, he reveals his experiential understanding of this mystical process by which one perceives God through meditative prayer. At the same time, he shapes his tripartite series into symbolic numerical patterns using rhyme, meter, and stanzaic structure that mirror the emblems found in the sonnets of Shakespeare. These numerical emblems, in both Jonson and Shakespeare, form specific allusions to the highly controversial English Jesuit missionary figures of Robert Persons, Edmund Campion, Henry Garnet, and Robert Southwell.

Within both his 80-line encomium of 1623 and “Poems of Devotion” of 1640, Jonson discloses a truth that unlocks the mystery of Shakespeare’s heart, a truth that has been assiduously sought by the most erudite of scholars since the 18^thcentury. What makes Shakespeare immortal, Jonson says, is not solely the universal humanity of his legendary characters. No, it is something far greater.

At the heart of Shakespeare’s poems and plays is the silent presence of, if not tribute to, the Jesuit missionary priests martyred under the powerful and glorious yet randomly persecutory Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled the newly emerging secular nation-state of England from 1558 until her death in 1603. In the most daring of styles during the great blossoming of the Renaissance in English literature, the genius of Shakespeare gives an eternal voice to these executed Jesuits by appropriating their very own words to inspire his art form. In doing so, he leaves a written record of one of the most rapacious periods of English history, shadowed beneath the surface of works that delight, instruct, and mystify us; stir our emotions; and create in us a sense of the profound and the aesthetic. Shakespeare draws heavily from the writings of the Jesuits to create some of the most memorable lines in all of western literature. In what is surely one of the greatest literary ironies ever, Shakespeare elevates the words of the martyrs to an unparalleled level of artistry that has sustained itself for more than four centuries. He summons to the fore a formidable array of imaginative faculties and uses the power of art to transcend not only the tragic experience of the martyrs but also the earthly bonds of all humanity. Through this bold and aesthetically innovative move, Shakespeare not only ensures the immortality of the missionaries, whose clandestine ministry segued into extreme political controversy and brutal execution, but he appears to have arrived at a deeper faith in the process.

One of the boldest efforts ever by the Society of Jesus was its mission to England as part of the Catholic reform movement, with the express mission to counter the effects of the Protestant Reformation that had begun under King Henry VIII. Officially founded in 1540 by Ignatius of Loyola in Spain as an order of the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus fanned out across Europe and enjoyed an extraordinary period of growth in the 25 years following his death in 1556. During this time, three generals ruled the Society—Diego Laynez (1558-1565), Francis Borgia (1565-1572), and Everard Mercurian (1573-1580). From the time of Ignatius to the death of Mercurian in 1580, the number of Jesuits worldwide increased fivefold to 5,000, while the number of colleges grew from 31 to 144. Missions were operating in places as far-flung as Florida, Mexico, and Peru.¹

England was a kingdom ripe for spiritual awakening in the religiously austere years of the Tudor monarchs. A now-recognized meaningful percentage of England’s population, Catholics had been deprived under the Queen’s religious “settlement” of access to the sacraments and spiritual guidance; this settlement, enacted in 1559, abolished the jurisdiction of the Pope, restored royal supremacy, and re-imposed a Protestant prayer book as the official worship of the Church of England. The Queen had been excommunicated by the Pope in 1570, complicating matters for English Catholics, particularly the Jesuits, who were aligned with Catholic Spain. Under various English laws, including penal statutes specifically targeted against the Jesuits, their essentially pastoral mission was treasonable. Any denial of the state’s supremacy in religion resulted in the penalty of execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering; oftentimes, the condemned was cut down after being hanged but while still alive, at which time the butchering took place.

In June of 1555, the first Englishman, Thomas Lith, was admitted to the Society of Jesus.²Fewer than 20 years later, Thomas Wodehouse would become the first English Jesuit executed. By the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign in 1603, a total of 11 English Jesuits had been executed.³ While that may seem a small number in comparison to the 124 seminary priests put to death during her reign,⁴ meaning those trained at the English Catholic seminaries abroad, it was the Jesuits with their bold, fresh new spirituality and dogged attempts to re-establish Catholicism that had the greatest impact in England. Of the “Forty Martyrs of England and Wales” canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970, nine were Jesuits. Of those nine approved for sainthood, four were executed under Queen Elizabeth—Edmund Campion, Alexander Briant, Robert Southwell, and Henry Walpole. Given that a mere seven Jesuits were operating on the ground in England in 1598, a number that had grown to only 52 by 1610, the 15 Jesuit executions under Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I translate into a staggering proportion of their total population.⁵

Equally striking, some 59 Catholic laymen were put to death under Elizabeth, while nearly 300 of the 500 seminary priests who returned to England during Elizabeth’s reign were imprisoned after 1574.⁶

The cultural impact of the Crown’s war against Catholics gave rise to a literature that sought to conceal its deepest meaning through artifice. In an era of outlawed Catholicism, missionary Jesuits in hiding relied heavily on coded language and numerical ciphers to send clandestine messages to one another. Art was monitored and forced underground. Dramatic and other expression became a venue for veiled Catholic dissidence in a persecutory environment in which Catholics were executed by the state, families destroyed, and human behavior altered toward extremism or bitter conformism under policies of Elizabeth that aimed to create a secular state. The oxymoron and pun favored by Elizabethan poets reflected a religiously divided England through the creation of double meanings, leading to literary ambiguity. The discovery of hidden layers of Ignatian theology in the work of Shakespeare, as well as complex number symbolism and acrostic arrangements revealing historical secrets, particularly in his sequence of 154 sonnets, contributes to a growing body of evidence pointing to not only the putative Catholicism of Shakespeare himself; it places his work within a Jesuit strategy to wage a war of words intended to stop persecution, win religious toleration from the monarchy at the very least, and boost the spirits of imprisoned and demoralized Catholics, while stirring others to action.

The English mission, which began in 1580 as the first permanent independent mission of the Society of Jesus, was finally granted the status of Province in 1623 after 43 years of bitter struggle. The Province of England was established and a novitiate opened in London at a time when the English Jesuits numbered 218.⁷The according of this special status occurred exactly 100 years after Ignatius of Loyola had completed the writing of the Spiritual Exercises in 1523. We may consider that to mark these two milestones, the First Folio was published in 1623.

Ignatius of Loyola was pragmatic, charismatic, mystical, and passionate. Likewise, the four Jesuit players in this Shakespearean drama—Robert Persons, Edmund Campion, Henry Garnet, and Robert Southwell—may be described, on a respective basis, in much the same way. Fate and luck were never the companions of Robert Persons. His pragmatism guided the Jesuit mission from its inception and sustained the Society’s political and spiritual objectives until his death in 1610. The cautious and politically astute nature of Persons was balanced by the charisma of the beloved cult figure of Edmund Campion, a gifted orator who was so revered while at Oxford that his gait was imitated. The mission was expanded in 1586 with the arrival of Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell. A deep friendship developed between the two based on the shared experience of living under the constant threat of detection and execution. An intense zeal for what they perceived was the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth sustained this friendship as well. Garnet was a great mystic who believed in the mysticism of numbers and the power of the Rosary to rescue the English Catholics. A student of a leading scientist and principal architect of the Gregorian calendar, Christopher Clavius, Garnet was both a mathematician and a talented musician. The deeply religious poetry and sturdy prose of his companion, the emotionally voluble Southwell, was the expression of a commitment so unwavering that he welcomed martyrdom in imitation of the Passion of Christ. Southwell was easily the greatest Catholic poet of the Renaissance, and his writings captivated contemporary poets and influenced future generations as well. Recent studies have shown the rather stunning extent to which identical words, phrases, and imagery appear in the work of Southwell and Shakespeare, with the latter drawing from the former. The commonly repeated assertion that Shakespeare coined as many as 2,000 new words quickly becomes myth after one consults the works of Southwell and discovers the Jesuit trailblazer of semantics.

There was no shortage of words issued from the pen of Robert Persons. Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580-1610 by Victor Houliston is mandatory reading on the extraordinary impact of Persons’ prolific literary output on the religious discourse of early modern England. The author of some 30 books in Latin and English, the Jesuit leader’s most significant work is undoubtedly The Book of Resolution, later named The Christian Directory. The execution of Campion in 1581 provided the encouragement for Persons to confront the political tempest of Elizabethan England. His initially pastoral mission to England turned political, and he tirelessly dedicated himself for the remainder of his life on the continent to the reconversion of England to the Catholic faith, especially through military means. But in his writing, the pastoral took precedence over the political, and his commitment to education never foundered.⁸Persons was a top scholar who built up seminaries in France and Spain at Saint-Omer, Valladolid, and Seville for the English Catholics, and he served as rector of the English College in Rome. He was substantially influenced by Claudio Acquaviva, who as General of the Society of Jesus from 1581 until 1615 sought to preserve the spiritual heritage of the Jesuits and the principles of Ignatius. Acquaviva strongly encouraged the “renovation” of the spirit of the individual Jesuit through a periodic return to the interior life of prayer, particularly prayer devoted to the Virgin Mary, as well as apostolic work in the field. While the Society of Jesus was already fundamentally devoted to the Virgin Mary, Acquaviva was responsible for taking this devotion to new heights.

The heart of Robert Persons can be found in a painting on the walls of the English College he founded at Valladolid in Spain. He is depicted before King Philip III of Spain, imploring the King’s permission to transfer the Virgin Vulnerata, a statue of the Virgin Mary that had been desecrated by English troops at Cadiz in 1596, to Valladolid for restoration.⁹The mind of Persons can be found as perfectly integrated with his heart in The Christian Directory, which encompassed his concept of “resolution.” As part of the desired synthesis of mind and heart in the Ignatian servant, Persons sought through the concept of resolution to promote an entirely new way of thinking that was grounded in faith. To this end, the Directory encouraged the twofold goal for the individual Catholic of making a resolution for Christ and implementing it.¹⁰

What is critical to understanding the motivation of Shakespeare is the deliberate promotion of Ignatian spirituality in England by Robert Persons, backed by the efforts and directives of Acquaviva. Persons provided the framework in his writings to enable a society deprived of devotions and prayers to choose a life directed by Christ. Specifically, he aimed to guide the reader through the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius that seeks to arouse sorrow and contrition in the individual exercitant. In this First Week, the exercitant meditates on three aspects of sin: (1) the history of sin, including both the original sin of the angels, who in Catholic theology deliberately rejected the notion of the coming of Christ, and the original sin of Adam and Eve, with a focus by the exercitant on the consequences—the loss of grace and a life full of toil and penance—of disobedience toward God; (2) the psychology of sin, including an examination of conscience through the contemplation of one’s own personal sins in the realization of the sinful nature of rebellion, with the special aim of gaining an intimate knowledge of the disorder that lies at the bottom of all sin; and (3) the eschatology of sin, or the contemplation on the mystery of Hell as the state of having been forsaken by God, with the special realization that Judgment on the last day of man will be based on one’s belief in Christ as the incarnation of God. The exercitant severs his attachment to the temporal world and engages in a colloquy with himself, as he imagines Christ on the cross; the goal of the First Week is to make the exercitant aware of the possibility of eternal salvation or eternal loss.

At the same time, Persons’ books of controversy and political tracts were designed to counter the vitriol of the monarchy against the Jesuits. He wanted to politically reinforce the Jesuit stance against conformity to Anglicanism through a moral uplifting of society, while providing English Catholics with direction and purpose. All of this was to be achieved by stressing the crucial point of the Spiritual Exercises at which the individual must turn away from the “vanities” of the world and resolve to follow Christ and serve God.

The critical juncture of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises is found at the heart of the Shakespearean canon, this study will show. The specific contemplations of the First Week, before the exercitant makes an Election especially in the Second Week to conform his life to Christ, are depicted in Jonson’s three-part “Poems of Devotion” as well. Through the allusions in this sequence to the numerical emblems of Shakespeare, it becomes abundantly clear that Ben Jonson possessed intimate knowledge of one of the deepest inspirations of the canon, as well as knowledge of the intricate devices through which Shakespeare expressed his innermost beliefs. The aim of this particular study is to reveal the Ignatian spirituality subtly infused throughout the canon of Shakespeare and to explore the avenues by which Shakespeare gained entry into this area of specialized knowledge.

To this end, it may be noted that Robert Persons was advocating the dissemination of written Catholic materials in England, whether of political controversy or spiritual devotion, to further the Jesuit cause of restoration of the Catholic faith. He openly recommended in a letter of 1582 the secret printing and dissemination of written propaganda and the employment of individuals “for the writing and secret printing of some books which we may write for the occasion to render the English people compliant” in connection with political schemes to overtake England by force.¹¹Upon his arrival in England, Persons had immediately recognized the need to bolster the work of the missionary priests through their own written and subsequently distributed works. Robert Southwell’s biographer, Nancy Pollard Brown, also says that Southwell was specifically selected for the mission based on his abundant literary talent, as both a skilled rhetorician and gifted poet, confirming the policy of Persons to enhance the mission through the written word.¹²The monarchy had frequently handed down proclamations condemning the importation and possession of books of religious controversy published on the continent. Books were seized at the ports and confiscated in Catholic homes, Brown notes. To counter these moves, the Jesuits established their own secret presses and gave volumes false imprints, but these presses were costly and dangerous, and discovery had led to the arrest and execution of priests. As a result of these difficulties, Brown says Persons turned to laymen for the dissemination of Catholic writing in both manuscript and printed form. His deliberate plan to employ writers for the express task of producing propaganda also indicates the willingness of Persons to delegate the task of writing influential works beyond his own substantial efforts in this area.

The employment of lay writers for propaganda purposes in the area of religion was apparently accepted practice. As one example, the episcopacy of the Church of England employed gifted contemporary poets, including John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, and Robert Greene, to counter the so-called Marprelate Tracts upholding the new doctrines of Puritanism. These tracts were written by one or more Puritans using the pseudonym Martin Marprelate and as part of a pamphlet war between Puritans and the Anglican Church.

In considering how Shakespeare may have come to infuse his plays and poems with Ignatian spirituality in precisely the manner advocated by Robert Persons, we may note the words of Persons in his memoir, attesting that both he and Edmund Campion had been “most hospitably received” in the house of Arden during their secret pastoral missions before Campion’s capture and execution in 1581. The house of Arden refers to the estate belonging to Edward Arden, a second cousin of Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. Shakespeare could have met both Persons and Campion through this venue, experienced the Spiritual Exercises, and morally aligned himself with a mission that had come into England to rescue Catholics. Two years later in 1583, Edward Arden was executed on suspect grounds after the so-called Somerville Plot to assassinate the Queen. Arden’s Warwickshire son-in-law John Somerville had joined the ranks of those during the mid-1580s who plotted in a number of schemes, many of which were flighty and ill-planned, to violently dethrone the Queen; these alleged plots led to increasingly harsh measures aimed at Catholics. The execution of both Campion and Arden could have easily provided Shakespeare with the motivation to “take up arms against a sea of troubles,” as later said by Hamlet (3.1.59), through dramatic and poetic writing with a politically subversive undercurrent. Campion’s execution had stunned Catholic England and galvanized a fresh wave of resistance against the Crown, including military efforts encouraged by Robert Persons to dethrone the Queen that culminated in the Spanish Armada of 1588, sparked by the execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots a year earlier.

We may also consider the comment of the Protestant historian John Speed, who famously, and scornfully, referred to Persons and Shakespeare as “this papist and his poet” in The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain of 1611. Speed in his extended remarks was denouncing Persons’ characterization of Sir John Oldcastle, the founder of the reform-minded Lollards, as a “ruffian knight, as all England knoweth, and commonly brought in by comedians on their stages.”¹³What makes his comments relevant to Shakespeare is that Oldcastle was the name initially given by Shakespeare to his legendary character Falstaff. “Speed’s scorn was no doubt partly prompted also by the Jesuit’s use of the stage to bolster his historical argumentation,” writes the Shakespeare critic Jean-Christophe Mayer.¹⁴

Drama was a staple on the curricula at the early Jesuit schools established throughout Europe. Ignatian spirituality was infused within Jesuit dramas, while the staging of plays was aimed at religious and moral instruction designed to provide a formative influence on the student as a whole. The aim of the Jesuits looked to the salvation and perfection of not only the souls of its members but also those of its fellow men. Indeed, Jesuit dramas typically staged sacred tragedies in the mold of Seneca, such as the Seneca revenge-like Hamlet, and comic-tragedies, such as Romeo and Juliet. Special features of Jesuit drama included ghost apparitions, such as that found in Hamlet, cloud apparatus, such as that found in Romeo and Juliet and possibly Macbeth, and interludes, such as those found in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

That Shakespeare enjoyed access to the most obscure writings of the Jesuits is remarkable. A well-known line from Hamlet draws from the unpublished dramatic writings of Edmund Campion. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.166-67) (boldface type added), the wise teacher-like Hamlet instructs his rationalist friend from the Protestant University of Wittenberg, where the Reformation technically began. This line is derived directly from a playful but didactically serious dramatic poem written by Campion while an instructor at the Jesuit university in Prague during the late 1570s: “There’s nothing sillier than these philosophers,/Fellows who brag they all things understand/In heaven and earth and in the depth beneath.”¹⁵

The line from Hamlet captures the essence of the Ignatian principle of God above man, Christ above monarch, heavenly justice above the letter of the law. Campion in his passage is sympathizing with his young Catholic scholars over the difficulty of reading Aristotle, while teaching them the importance over rational philosophy of recognizing the absolute love of an omniscient God. The lines written by Campion and Shakespeare both involve learning and students and reflect the views of the Jesuit founder. “Ignatius measured the knowledge gained in the course of laborious theological study against the sweet simplicity of what he had learned from deep contemplation in faith,” writes Hugo Rahner SJ in Ignatius the Theologian. The phrase “in heaven and earth” reflects the essence of Ignatian spirituality—a tension of opposites between the spiritual love of God and the Holy Trinity in the “above,” on the one hand, and natural man and the letter of the Church in the “below,” on the other hand, with Christ in the middle as mediator. Hamlet seeks to make Horatio aware of the choice, presented to the individual, between vowing loyalty to God through the mediator Christ as preferable to swearing loyalty to the policies of men.