Читать книгу Shakespeare and the Jesuits - Andrea Campana - Страница 5

A distinct reality remains hidden behind the canon of Shakespeare. The theories of an English Jesuit theologian named John Floyd underpin various thoughts beneath the artifice of the canon’s secular surface, particularly in Hamlet. Floyd was a controversialist whose writings against Calvinism and Puritanism first appeared in 1612, the year after Shakespeare retired from the stage; he wrote under the names Fludd, Daniel à Jesu (an anagram of “Ioannes Fluides,” according to the priest John Southcote), Hermannus Loemelius, George White, Fidelis Annosus, Verementanus Druinus, and the initials J.R., standing for his alias John Rivers. Several of his controversial tracts were co-authored with the Jesuit John Percy, alias Fisher.¹

Floyd was born on October 14, 1574, in Badlingham, a tiny hamlet within Cambridgeshire’s parish of Chippenham. He studied at the schools for English Catholics at Eu in Normandy, Rheims, and Rome; entered the Society of Jesus in 1592; was appointed sometime around 1597 as prefect of studies at the Jesuit College in Valladolid, Spain, where he also served as prefect of students; and was ordained in Spain in 1599. He held the positions of admonitor and consultor, positions of influence in which he served as a check and evaluator of the Jesuit superior, as well as advised on important matters. These positions indicate Floyd as a person of not only intelligence but integrity. Indeed, Floyd was given high marks by his superiors in the areas of skill and imagination and was seen as distinguished in all genres of “letters,” or writing. He was recommended by his superiors for teaching, preaching, and writing and subsequently taught theology and philosophy with acclaim and became well known as a preacher before laboring on the English mission. He seems to have crossed over to England sometime after his ordination and surfaces in the records upon capture in 1606 while visiting the Jesuit missionary Edward Oldcorne in a Worcester jail. He was detained and imprisoned for one year in England and sent into exile with 46 other priests in 1607. At Douai, four days after Ignatius Loyola was beatified by Pope Paul V in 1609, Floyd professed his four vows to the Society of Jesus on a date of great importance to the Jesuits, July 31—the date of the death of Ignatius of Loyola in 1556. (In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet’s birth date is July 31.) He served again on the mission in England for several years, beginning in 1609, and eventually settled at Louvain and Saint-Omer as a professor of theology and philosophy. Floyd died suddenly of apoplexy (stroke) on September 16 or 17, 1649, in the town of Saint-Omer, then in Spanish Flanders but now in northern France. He presumably lies buried in this tranquil Flemish town on the grounds of the old English College founded there in 1593 by the Jesuits, although burial records are scanty. Today, the site of the old College is occupied by a school for French youths.

The relationship of John Floyd to Shakespeare can be traced through Floyd’s elder brother. Henry Floyd was also a Jesuit missionary priest in England and was highly instrumental in recruiting young Catholic men to the mission.²Henry was born in Cambridgeshire in 1563 but in the diocese of Norfolk, the provincial home of the Jesuit Robert Southwell. After completing his studies at the English College at Rheims, he was sent in 1589 as a promising youth to assist in establishing the new Jesuit College in Valladolid founded by Robert Persons. He drew the commendation of Persons after defending, with distinction, universal theology in Seville in 1593. It is likely that Henry Floyd’s rhetorical skills earned him a place on the English mission. Persons was known to favor those with strong speaking and writing abilities, as the English mission was a mission of the written word aimed at spiritual instruction and persuading lay Catholics against lapsing into conformity to Anglicanism. Henry Floyd subsequently crossed over to England around 1597, shortly after the execution of Robert Southwell, who had been personally selected by Persons for his expertise as a writer. His brother John Floyd, a highly talented and passionate writer with a predilection for metaphor, seems to have followed several years later. Once on the mission, Henry Floyd was assigned, most likely by the mission superior Henry Garnet, to serve as chaplain to Sir John Southcote (1552-1637), a position Floyd held for 19 years until 1616, the year Shakespeare died.

The Southcote household served as a base for the Jesuit mission in Essex, Suffolk, and as far north as Norfolk.³Although Henry Floyd lived with Southcote, he was funded by the Catholic Petre family of Essex, whose staunchly pro-Jesuit enclave included not only the Southcotes but the Waldegrave family and the noted composer William Byrd. Sir John Southcote, a contemporary of Sir John Petre, was married to Magdalen Waldegrave, the younger sister of Petre’s wife Mary.

The so-called Waldegrave manuscript is one of only a few manuscripts still in existence today that contains the sequence of devotional lyrics comprising the greater part of Southwell’s English verse. The manuscript is named as such, because during Shakespeare’s day, its owner was the Waldegrave family of Essex. Sir Edward Waldegrave was married to Frances Neville, a Catholic matron presented with various Southwell poems, including the long Saint Peter’s Complaint; Neville was the daughter of Sir Edward Neville (1471-1538) of Bergavenny, executed for his support of the Pope in opposition to Henry VIII’s quest for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Margaret Neville (died 1575), the daughter of Sir Thomas Neville (1484-1542), was married to Sir Robert Southwell, the great uncle of the Jesuit Robert Southwell. Sir Edward Neville and Sir Thomas Neville were brothers, making Frances and Margaret Neville first cousins. These relationships shed light on the path through which the Southwell poems made their way to the Waldegrave family.

According to genealogical records, the sister of Edward Arden (1542-1583), Barbara Arden (born 1528), was married to Richard Neville of Park Hall (1523-1590), son of William Neville and Elizabeth Greville, tying Shakespeare to the Neville family.

The poetry of Southwell, as well as that of Philip Howard, the Earl of Arundel, was circulated among Catholic families in East Anglia largely by the recusant Catholic copyist Peter Mowle of Attleborough, Norfolk; many of these families had been devastated by execution. Frances Neville later became Lady Paulet through a subsequent marriage, and it was as Lady Paulet that she received the poems. Magdalen Waldegrave was the daughter of Sir Edward Waldegrave and Frances Neville, while their son Nicholas Waldegrave inherited the family home at Borley and the collection of Southwell manuscripts along with it.⁴The signature of the young daughter of Nicholas, Jeronima, appears on a blank page of the Waldegrave manuscript.

Other prominent families of East Anglia would have known the Southwells, who were among the leading gentry in Norfolk, and would likely have been part of the Howard retinue. Many of these Catholic families also owned homes in the area of London now known as Spitalfields, where Southwell compiled some of his work, including An Epistle of Comfort, and close to where the mission superior Henry Garnet took up residence after Southwell’s arrest.⁵Close in proximity to the Spitalfields enclave were the townhomes of Lord William Vaux and Sir Thomas Tresham, both of whom had been arrested for sheltering Edmund Campion. Tresham, who returned to the Catholic faith at the persuasions of Robert Persons in 1580, was married to Muriel Throckmorton, whose sister Mary was married to Edward Arden, the second cousin of Shakespeare’s mother. The sister of Sir Thomas Tresham, Mary Tresham, was married to William Vaux, 3^rdBaron Vaux of Harrowden, whose daughters Eleanor and Anne sheltered the mission superior Henry Garnet.

Additionally, Sir John Southcote’s son John was a priest and professor of theology counted among the clerical friends surrounding Anthony Maria Browne, 2^ndViscount Montague. Anthony Browne was the cousin of Henry Wriothesley, 3^rdEarl of Southampton and Shakespeare’s literary patron. Furthermore, Edward Southcote (son of Sir John and brother of the cleric) was married to Elizabeth Seaborne, whose sister was married to Christopher Roper, 2^ndBaron Teynham, of the staunchly Catholic Roper family. Christopher Roper’s sister was married to George Vaux, son of Lord William Vaux.

Shakespeare’s kinship ties to Sir Thomas Tresham through the Ardens would have given him access to the Southcote family and ultimately to the Floyd brothers, as well as to the band of Catholics organized upon the arrival of Persons and Campion in 1580, which likely included Thomas Pounde, cousin to the 2^ndEarl of Southampton. His ties to the 3^rdEarl of Southampton also would have given Shakespeare access to the Southcote family and to the Floyds. His ties to the Neville family would have given Shakespeare access to Southwell’s poems and to the Floyd brothers through the Waldegraves.

Literary naysayers will claim that such connections prove nothing about the religious loyalties of Shakespeare or his possible collaboration with the Jesuits. The answer, therefore, must be sought in the text.

A perusal of the poetry written by Edward de Vere, 17^thEarl of Oxford, reveals it as bearing little resemblance to the work of Shakespeare. For example, Oxford’s rather pedestrian verses on love compared to a tennis game—“Whereas the heart at tennis plays and men to gaming fall,/Love is the Court, Hope is the House, and Favor serves the Ball”—pale artistically in comparison to such unparalleled lines from Shakespeare as, “This my hand will rather/The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/Making the green one red” (Macbeth 2.2.58-60).

Yet oddly, a distinct reality remains hidden behind the presence of Oxford, not in terms of authorship but of kinship. Not widely known is that the Catholic Earl of Oxford was a cousin of Robert Southwell, whose work contains substantially similar thought as that found in the canon of Shakespeare. Additionally, recent studies have shown the extraordinary breadth of identical words and phrases common to the writings of Shakespeare and Southwell.⁶The Jesuit was arrested under a 1585 law enacted during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I that aimed to eradicate Catholicism by making it treason for any English priest ordained overseas to return to the kingdom. While imprisoned, he was singled out for especially brutal torture over the course of three years before being executed in 1595.

At Padua in 1575, the Earl of Oxford, after receiving a license to travel abroad in January of that year, was known to have met with an associate of the future Jesuit mission leader Robert Persons named Luke Astlow, whose untimely death prevented his entry into the Society of Jesus; the Earl’s license was renewed in 1576.⁷These were the beginning years—1575 and 1576—of the landmark establishment (1579) of the English College in Rome as a training ground for English missionary priests; Robert Southwell left England in May of 1576 for a Catholic education abroad and entered the Jesuit school at Douai in June, a time when the spiritual fervor of the Catholic Reformation was sweeping across Europe. Subsequently in the late 1570s, the Earl of Oxford and Francis Southwell (a cousin of the Jesuit Robert Southwell and thus Oxford) formed the nucleus of a group of mostly Catholic nobles promoting a marital match between the Queen and France’s Duke of Anjou, in secret hopes of advancing the Catholic cause in England. The families of several of these nobles, including the powerful Howards and Arundells, had been brutalized by severe persecution and execution under the Tudor monarchs. As one example, the Arundell family of Cornwall suffered for its defense in 1577 of a young Catholic named Cuthbert Mayne—the first priest trained by the Jesuits at the English Catholic seminaries abroad to be executed in England—while Charles Arundell’s mother was the sister of the executed Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII.

The pro-marriage group included such notables as Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and his uncle Henry, Lord Howard; Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; and John Manners, Earl of Rutland. Importantly, and in relation to Henry and John Floyd, the group included Henry, Lord Compton, whose son would become the Earl of Northampton. A sister of John and Henry Floyd married a Compton, making the two Jesuits uncles to a Henry, John, and Thomas Compton, according to state papers quoted in the records of the Jesuit historian Henry Foley.

After Henry, Lord Compton died in 1589, his widow, Anne Spencer (1555-1618), married Robert Sackville, 2^ndEarl of Dorset (1561-1609); the relationship of the Comptons and the Sackvilles was further solidified when Sir Henry Compton (1584-1649), the son of Henry, Lord Compton and Anne Spencer, married Cicely Sackville, daughter of Robert Sackville. Robert Sackville had first been married to Margaret Howard, the daughter of Thomas Howard, the 4^thDuke of Norfolk executed in 1572 for plotting to replace Queen Elizabeth with the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots as ruler of England. Margaret Sackville was the half sister of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, son of the executed Thomas Howard by his first wife; Philip Howard died in the Tower of London in 1595 after a decade of imprisonment for his Catholicism. Upon Margaret Sackville’s death in 1591, Robert Southwell wrote a consolatory epistle for the incarcerated Philip Howard entitled The Triumphs Over Death, extolling the virtues of the pious Margaret. Shakespeare draws heavily from this prose work, especially with regard to Sonnet 126, as will be shown.

Importantly, the connection between the Compton and Sackville families creates a personal link tying Henry and John Floyd to Robert Southwell. Southwell himself was related by marriage to Margaret Sackville through the Audley family.

Furthermore, a Richard Floyd of Norwich in Norfolk married into the Hobart family of Norwich in 1513, according to genealogical records. Southwell biographer F.W. Brownlow reports that the Southwell family home at Horsham St. Faith, Robert’s birthplace, was sold in 1588 to Sir Henry Hobart at a time when Richard Southwell, the Jesuit’s father, was mired in financial difficulties. If Richard Floyd were indeed an ancestor of the Jesuits Henry and John Floyd, this would further establish a relationship, perhaps one of kinship, between the Floyds and Southwell.

Edward Floyd (died 1648), a Roman Catholic barrister and the apparent brother of John and Henry Floyd, served as a steward in Shropshire to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (Sir Thomas Egerton, died 1617) and to Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Suffolk (died 1626). The Earl of Suffolk was the son of the executed Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, and the brother of Margaret Sackville. (They were the children of the 4th Duke’s second wife, Margaret Audley.) As stated above, Henry, Lord Howard, the brother of the executed 4th Duke, was a member of the group of Catholic nobles seeking a marriage between the Queen and the French Duke. Importantly, these connections further establish a relationship between the Floyd brothers and the Howards, and ultimately tie the Floyds to the Jesuit Robert Southwell.

The marital negotiations involving Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou eventually failed, and lobbying by Catholic nobles for Jesuit assistance in England—in addition to such calls by the Jesuit Robert Persons—served as the impetus for approval, in late 1579, by the Society of Jesus of the formal establishment of a Jesuit mission to England.⁸Oxford’s Catholicism was revealed to the monarchy, and he was forced to defect from the pro-marriage Catholic coalition, helping to dismantle the group. Yet Oxford’s kinship to Southwell presents a compelling case for a possible clandestine pro-Jesuit stance of the Earl and assistance to the mission. The Jesuit mission was officially launched in 1580, but it quickly devolved into extreme political controversy and brutal execution.

The Earl of Oxford was linked to Southwell by way of the Trussell family, a branch of which lived in Stratford-on-Avon. Susanna Shakespeare was married on the grounds of the Trussell estate, Billesley Manor, while Thomas Trussell of Billesley was involved in the purchase by Thomas Arden of Wilmcote of the Snitterfield estate that was passed to Shakespeare’s father John through his wife, Mary Arden. The 15^thEarl of Oxford (de Vere’s grandfather) was married to Elizabeth Trussell, daughter of Margaret Don, whose family would produce the poet John Donne, and Sir Edward Trussell of Elmesthorpe, a small town located near Birmingham and in close proximity to the home of Edward Arden. The daughter of Elizabeth Trussell and the 15^thEarl, Elizabeth de Vere, was married to Thomas Darcy, whose cousin Mary Darcy was the grandmother of the Jesuit Robert Southwell.

The kinship of Trussell and Southwell explains why a minor poet named John Trussell edited the 1595 quarto of Southwell’s Triumphs Over Death. The relationship of Trussell and Arden explains why Trussell’s own poem entitled “The First Rape of Fair Helen” and its preface bear shades of Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. The kinship of Trussell and de Vere puts Shakespeare within the circles of both the Earl of Oxford and Southwell. Shakespeare biographer Charlotte Stopes has theorized that Mary Arden’s mother, whose name is unknown, was a Trussell. Indeed, Shakespeare’s two older sisters who died as infants were named Joan and Margaret, likely named for Mary Arden’s sisters, Joan and Margaret; records show that the Trussell family of Elmesthorpe includes the names of Joan and Margaret. These relationships would have given Shakespeare access to Southwell himself.